Marty Gervais
Windsor writer Marty Gervais is a journalist, poet, photographer, teacher, and publisher who has written more than a dozen books of poetry, two plays, a collection of essays about his home town, and a novel. Awards include the Acorn-Plantos People's Poetry Award, Toronto's prestigious Harbourfront Festival Prize, and the City of Windsor Mayor's Award for Literary Arts. He is currently a columnist at the Windsor Star, the Resident Writing Professional at the University of Windsor, the managing editor of the Windsor Review literary magazine, and the founder and publisher of Black Moss Press, now celebrating its fortieth anniversary, and one of the oldest literary presses in Canada. Versions of the following poems appear in his new book, Lucky Days (Mosaic 2009).
Imagining Myself Bearing Good News At dawn, the corridors are silent and I wander the hospital I get off at the second floor see the north wing entrance draped with Do Not Enter tape the nursing station abandoned metal racks now empty of patients' binders the wing shut down lights dimmed I am walking at the bottom of the sea imagine the drift and heave of plant life, pyramids of form eerie fish drifting in slow motion in this muted ballet of form and ritual The doors to rooms are opened wide like forlorn outstretched hands of the souls of Purgatory or barn doors left swinging in a storm or doors of a wrecked ship lodged in the havoc of sand I am walking at the bottom of the sea alone and silent among the dead a place of faint memories extinct clangour of rolling carts breakfast trays and footsteps amid hushed prayers of the ill I move from room to room —a visitor, a stranger, a friend imagine myself carrying daffodils imagine myself bearing good news imagine myself bringing life to all that seemed doomed I am walking at the bottom of the sea My heart swims above me like a face I ought to know That Day at War I had forgotten until I wended my way through the streets in this northern Iraqi city how as an adolescent in Bracebridge we tossed whiskey bottles stuffed with lit gasoline-soaked rags at rotted out tree stumps and ran like hell and buried our heads in the snowbanks feeling a deafening shudder in the cold earth We played soldiers from the Second World War borrowed jammed German Lugers defunct bolt action rifles and stick grenades —souvenirs from other boys' fathers who came home from the war We crawled through the wet underbrush creeping up on imaginary enemy lines and once set fire to a hermit's shack in the woods along the river behind my father's factory until one winter we outgrew such games took up snooker at the pool hall spent days in the smoke-filled confines below Main Street and forgot war and terror Now I walk this market street in Northern Iraq, listen to a man telling me how his best friend's son was left bloodied and dead on the doorstep of his house to make a statement to register fear to tell the world And I wondered about the poor man whose house we burned in the dead of winter, what kind of statement that was what kind of war |