Editor’s Note: Each day from December 1 -21, Halifax’ poet laureate Sue Goyette will write a new poem to share with the city on The Coast’s website and social media. “If I need this, I bet other people need this,” she told us on day one—and we think she’s right. In a year that’s felt like a months-long dusk, this will be some light we can carry forward, together, until the days begin to grow again.
Here is her poem for December 4:
I took a course on radical hope known to some as slow television: the seven and a half-hour train ride from Bergen to Oslo. My notes are sporadic and nonsensical. I understood, overall, that we are pixelating; that our way of being is moving through chaos and is breaking into particles. I know little about chaos except its taste: the waft of orange plastic hospital chair, for example. The spice of dismay that burns the throat. The sour diode of violence. The train travels through mountains by tunnel. Jonathan Lear tells us that hope is radical when we lack the appropriate concepts to properly understand it. Tunnel after tunnel: a study of darkness. Then realized I was missing the true transformative lesson introduced as a small dot, a new punctuation mark to place after gratitude or a welcome. This dot grows. Wider and brighter. And seems to be a version of the way out. As in: the end of the tunnel. Of course, this is just another version of a beginning, which explains the fear. At this point my notes are of poorly drawn flowers and exclamation marks, i.e. no help at all.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2020.
