What Should Stay Buried
Time caught in a capsule. Sorrow there
or joy as you imagine opening it up?
Perhaps, better, if you put it back. To not know
what was left behind.
a man and woman so young then. Babies
not yet born. The woman not yet asleep in another man’s bed. Pearl
as they called it not yet bombed. Beirut, when it was
the Paris of the Middle East. The young ones, brown-skinned, before
the top hats and whale-bone dresses before
the burials, before the bulldozers broke what marked
the graves.
Before the churches burned, before Christ turned his back,
before anger’s black smoke
tore down everything and ripped words
from cindered throats.
Before.Before.Before.Before.Before.Before.Before.Before.Before.Before.
Richard Osler
Richard Osler
The thing is how to fit a life inside anything - a fist, a smile, a frown. How to fit in a 100 pound mountain dog, four adult children, a grand daughter, seventy years? And my dearheart, Somae. How to fit in specialty money management, journalism and now, full time, poetry. A full length volume in 2016, Hyaeana Season, a chapbook in 2012. And a faciltator of generative poetry retreats including ten day poetry retreats in Italy (next one, May 2022) and per year right now more than eighty group generative poetry therapy workshops and more than three hundred individual poetry therapy sessions!
Poem for Hour Two
A Mesostic – For and Not For My Dog Tugboat
“These cracked elbows, the only sign of time passing”
—Canisia Lubrin from The Dzgraphxst, page 41
Cracked elbows, the only sign of Time
passing Canisa says bUt
not true God said
to me just now sounding puzzled, the Big bang and its
aftermath, all that nOthing turned into somethings,
for darn near fourteen billion yeArs that’s
big, very big, sign of Time passing he told me.
What more of Time do I need
or want to know aboUt with death
always this TuG
at my ankles, this Bounded true
nOrth, all of us heading
in the sAme direction
Time or no time.
To pass the Time, mark
time, waste time, plUg
the holes in the boat of time Going down
anyway, so why Bother giving
time or cracked elbows a secOnd thought. Why not
imagine a dog, any dog, but especiAlly my dog, Tugboat
bounding along Today untugged, unleashed
to time.
*The mesostic form like the acrostic form takes a word and spells it vertically down the page but unlike the acrostic places it to create varied left and right margins.
Richard Osler
Poem for Hour Two
Poetry Half Marathon
June 26th, 2021
Introduction
Hi! Richard Osler here from the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada! So enjoyed my last (“halfer) in 2017 and then scheduling conflicts got in the way of the next few. I have been writing poems steadily since about 2004 on! Have two published collections, full length and a chapbook and I have written more than 300 poetry blog posts since 2010 at recoveringwords.com! And i facilitate a ton of poetry therapy sessions each year! More than 400 in the past 12 months!
Hello from Duncan, Vancouver Island, Canada
Trying to figure all the teck stuff out. And managing. Looking forward to this. Know it will be tough, the 12 hour, but hoping years of writing poems will help! I have had a group of friends who write a poem a day each January – five years now. But this ups the ante! And I echo the best wishes of others. All best, Westcoast Richard.