Penn Kemp

Poetry

 

 

Rise and Shine

This January when double doors open back and
forth, turn your face to the rear. Who’s there but
shadows, looming in the corners under cobwebs?
 
As your eyes adjust to the gloom, they perceive
difference, shades of distinction, distinct shades
along the grey scale. Scaly amphibians straight
 
out of the Jurassic. Scary Neanderthals, hairy
and club-ready to protect or attack. You can only
hope they’re on your side of this communal bed.
 
Long lines of ancestors wave and bow, ready to
speak in languages you never in this life knew but
vaguely recall, resounding along time’s long tunnel.

Forward and back, the voices call and collect one
another to pass their message along. Can you hear
what they are crying?  Flotillas of odd memory rise

like ice floes floating, then sink below again along
with the thermometer. From eleven below to eleven
above in hours, then they fall back below freezing.

The old gods are stirring, rising from bone beds to
raise the alarm high. It’s too early. Or is it too late?
The alarm reverberates in your ears, startling you to

new determination, starting from zero, inviting new
colour to return with the day, actively absorbing old
prototypes into new design, emerging, nearly ready.

 

 

 

Passage: Homing to the Given

I am moving into old time
Fire embraces my shadow,
absorbs darkness into heat.

Friends linger, huddle under
our circular warmth. 10,000
years melt away in the current

climate shift. There goes snow.
Too late for comfort, too late to
reverse trends toward entropy.

Decades, centuries speed past
future possible, pass as currencies
of passable, improbable presents.

How to turn this tendency around.
Rapidly, rapidly. Restraint is not
enough. Constraint does not reverse.

That’s not the story. I’m drifting.
The ceremony commenced while
attention was off in its own helium.

I am standing before the entrance
of deep cave, a cave I recognize
only by the dark its shadow casts.

Fire gleams. Fire climbs the walls,
dances into consistent, solid form.
A sense of bear emerges into three

dimensions. Someone from behind
must be holding up the bearskin
like a gentleman with a cloak for

his lady. There is no one there but
the bear shape is now my contour.
Bear shape becomes me. Becomes

my own. If only he had not stolen
my skin, this new comfort would be                                                                                   
large enough to let me roam back
long enough to call home. Home.
 

 

 

Culture Shock and Smooth Return

The mothers are washing their babies
in municipal tanks that reek of slime

and brackish river water. “All water’s
holy,” you proclaim, “in Mother India,”

and I regard again the women flailing
laundry white against broad river stone.

Sun glints gold threads on scarlet saris.
I step into the current till cotton wraps

wet around my knees, willing to float
and submerge, until from the shore you

wave me back for the next shift of scene.

                                     Now

we’re swimming our lake toward the city.

Water falls off us like liquid wings of teal,
Murky and lukewarm, they should feel frigid

given the lacy fronds of ice creeping from
shore. Are we drifting into hypothermia?

Not in this dream dimension where elements
mingle. Joy beyond perception propels our

arms’ strong crawl toward the place we know

as home and the Kali of time who changes us all.

 

 

 

Brooding Night Mares

 

A family of Clove horses roams through
nightfall. Spice of life, ground but not blown

on turbulent winds. Settled in green paddock,
grazing the surface, content to browse.

Not Clydesdale but Clove. Feathered
but flightless, smaller than Percheron.

Corralled there to breed more handsome
foals that will pepper fine familiar pastures

of the past with glittery black sheen. None
of those cloven hooves cleft in summers gone

disturb the dust as they wing their way through
dream dimensions on toward nightfall, toward

the mare’s feast of Epona, the stables of Rhiannon.

 

 

 

For Persephone

 

Here I hide in darkness
sullenly squeezing red
pomegranate seeds.

 

Sometime I will return.
Not now. Too much hurt
reverberates the will.

 

The mothers still curse me with sharp
insatiable teeth hissing through gaps.

Generations swell enraged.

 

I chew the pomegranate slowly.
No gaps in my teeth. Here I am

 

young. I am beautiful. Eating
this fruit I am almost inviolate.

 

No regrets and no remorse
and no second course.

 

             These are just deserts.

No-one sows the spring seeds.

 

 

 

Recurring Dream Theme

 

Night rustles outside our window, murmurs
and squeaks. Whimpers follow outraged

raccoon yowl. Orange and black streak
across the dark pane I can’t see through

into night creatures’ world, conjuring
interlaced smells of skunk, mouse, bat—
disturbing our neighbour hound's nose.

Scent leads a trail to territorial war, deep
enmities nurtured throughout the long

hours before dawn lifts that velvet cloth to
reveal grey, seeping shade back to clarity.

Daylight cicada notions begin threading a
brightening air. Dragonflies wing-web

the pond. Inside I dream on of a prowling
tigress, White Goddess stalking the dark.

 

 

 

Performance poet, activist and playwright Penn Kemp is the League of Canadian Poets 2015 Spoken Word Artist of the Year. Her latest works are two anthologies: Performing Women and Women and Multimedia.  Her new book of poems Barbaric Cultural Practice (Quattro Press, Toronto) will be published this fall. See www.pennkemp.wordpress.com and www.mytown.ca.pennkemp.