JOANNA LILLEY AT THE POETRY PARTY
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A bubal
hartebeest drawn by Philip Sclater, from the The Book of Antelopes, 1894.
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Joanna Lilley writes: This
poem, ‘I Hold Up My Hands,’ is from my new poetry collection, Endlings, which is all about extinction.
This particular poem is about the bubal hartebeest which used to exist in large
herds north and south of the Sahara Desert but became extinct in the
1920s. It steadily declined in the nineteenth century, not
least because entire herds were massacred by the French military after
their conquest of Algeria.
Joanna Lilley
I HOLD UP MY HANDS
wrists
together, palms open,
angled,
fingers lifted
to make
the shape
of
horns. A flower,
now
swiftly a chalice.
You
pour into the space
I hold.
I carry the air
of you,
the nothing
you
have become.
My
fingertips tickle
with
the scented recollection
of high
savannah grass.
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| Joanna Lilley photo by Michael Edwards |
Joanna Lilley was going to read this
poem in a few places, including Brown and Dickson Bookstore in London, Ontario,
with Tom Cull; knife fork book in Toronto with Kate Marshall Flaherty and Laura
K. McRae; and at the Animals Across Discipline, Time and Space conference in
Hamilton with John Hill, Madeleine Lavin,
Mandy-Suzanne Wong. She was also going to be reading at the Vertigo Series
in Regina with Saskatchewan Book Award nominees; at McNally Robinson in
Winnipeg in a panel discussion with Victoria Markstrom, curator at the Canadian
Fossil Discovery Centre, and Cary Hamel, director of conservation for Nature
Conservancy of Canada's Manitoba region; and at the North American Association
of Critical Animal Studies conference in Kelowna, BC.