poetry

Succour
by Lesley Pasquin

Imagine your heart is so petrified, it simply drops from your chest onto the sidewalk for someone else to find. Do you wander heartless? And the woman who claims it? Will she search for you, easy to find with your gaping wound, or will she keep the heart, wondering about the story that needs to be told, how someone, somewhere is fading, blood no longer carrying breath, bog bones brittle.

The story that needs to be told is that even a butterscotch lollipop can give you comfort; that duck decoys are to be avoided, but not small green frogs or the bracken at the edge of the rock; that walking barefoot after a storm to pick armfuls of downed peonies is an act of reverence; that naming things makes them so and a life can be built from small scraps of paper on which you have written the meaning of everything.

Two rocks on the shore barely touch but if one were moved, the entire scene would change. Water knows this. Wind knows this.

Stand with your palm outstretched to catch the rain. Learn to rely on the kindness of bears.

Lesley Pasquin is a Montreal writer, poet and teacher. She is currently an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University. She has written for educational journals and the Globe and Mail. Her poems have been published online at Montreal Serai. She has produced a chapbook entitled Alabaster in a Stone Wall. She has read at The National Library of Canada, The Yellow Door, Notre Dames de Montreal and is a frequent guest at Poetry Plus. Lesley explores myth and religion in her work, as well as the intimate details of women's lives.