Carolyn Smart: A Poem
SHELTER
My 11 year old
self is walking on the playing field
towards the
rhododendron woods, the edge
of my
boarding-school grounds.
To my right is
the single swing where the Lady Caroline
explained to me
how her mother was a Countess, dark hair
parting open
then closed on her freckled, anxious face.
Why do you not
go back to America,
the girls ask,
that place where the President was shot,
is that not
where people who talk like you should be?
But that is not
where I live, nor do I live in Canada now, for
my parents have
sailed away, taking their arguments with them.
They do not
write to tell me of our future. They do not write at all.
Inside the
rhodo woods the older girls build shelters.
We sweep our
tree house spotless every day,
brooms of
leaves, bent boughs as seats.
It is only
children here and we are kinder
in a way to one
another, in the woods.
We are a sort
of family, and briefly unafraid.
It is important
who we let inside our shelter.
This small one
standing eager at the entrance:
she might
change everything.
From time to
time I glance behind to
the far side of
the trees and the high grey wooden fence.
Beyond that is
the road, the world, the sea.
 |
| (Ian Barber, courtesy Red Edge Images) |
Carolyn Smart is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and since 1989 has been Professor of Creative Writing at Queen's University. Hooked - Seven Poems has become a performance piece, featured at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2013 and upcoming at Theatre Passe Muraille in the spring of 2015. Her forthcoming poetry collection Careen (Brick Books, fall 2015) tells the story of the Barrow Gang. Read my conversation with Carolyn Smart here.