Enter
In the early
hours of
the morning
thousands
of large
vehicles enter
the city
blowing sirens
and horns.
We're all
suddenly wide
awake. Most
of us are
always home, day and
night (by
choice
of course). Our
meals are
delivered
to our doors.
Many, many years ago
the frail and
elderly confined to
their homes had
a meals-on-wheels
program or so
I'm told.
The drivers of
the heavy tractors
head into the
city center. These farmers,
many of them
older, are among
the few of us
who still venture
outdoors. They
want to remind us where
our food comes
from
though most of
our fruits and
vegetables,
like us, are now
grown indoors
in vertical
gardens.
Floats
I found the coast
storm-strewn
with French books
fallen overboard,
when I walked
the shore
years ago,
pages open
to the breeze.
Ragged, worn
and wet, I took
a book home
and I still enjoy
the essence
of those pages
where we share
the best and
embrace
the worst, but
where the best floats
to the surface.
Ancestors
A day after heavy rain
I stand at just the right
angle and find a forest
mirror—this physics of light
where the sky-blue, leaf
green, and limbs of the trees
reflect from the pool
of water in the hollow
stump of an ancestor.
Eleonore Schönmaier’s latest collection is Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). Wavelengths of Your Song (MQUP) was published in German translation as Wellenlängen deines Liedes (parasitenpresse, 2020). Dust Blown Side of the Journey (MQUP) was a finalist for the Eyelands Book Awards 2020 (Greece).
Her poetry has been set to music by Greek, Dutch, Scottish, American and Canadian composers including Michalis Paraskakis, Panos Gklistis and Carmen Braden. She’s won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, the Earle Birney Prize, the National Broadsheet Contest, and was one of the winners in the Poem in Your Pocket Day contest 2023. Her poetry has been widely anthologized in the United States and Canada including in Best Canadian Poetry. http://eleonoreschonmaier.com
