David C. Brydges : Haven

folio : energy stories

 

 

Brave, yellow discs hat dandelions,
calmly clustered on the corner
of fire lane # 1 and refinery road.
Across the street is Trans Alta’s power plant.
But you are the real power plant!
Yielding not an inch of ugliness
to the three-layer barbwire fence,
and grey steel pillars
of high voltage power lines.
Everything is planned here.
Except for unrestricted access
to your secret shelter.
Where grace and grit
lesson the heart’s
unbearable dullness of being. 

 

 

 

David C. Brydges is a cultural historian and community legacy builder. He is the artistic director of the Spring Pulse Poetry Festival in Northern Ontario. Memberships include Parkland Poets and Stroll of Poets in Alberta, Ontario Poetry Society, Haiku Canada, Academy of American Poets, and League of Canadian Poets. David has four chapbooks published and one full-length book, Vagabond Post Office. His second upcoming full-length book, Vaulting to Venus, will be published in summer 2021.

This poem was written while David was a construction worker at the Suncor Refinery complex in Northern Alberta, working at the Trans Alta power plant. David says, “Walking outside the plant, I saw the clump of dandelions on a little mound of dirt amidst all this industrial architecture. It gave me a brief poetic sense of beauty in this highly antithetical place.”