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 15:
Here is her poem for December 15:
I read somewhere that space smells of metal, a simmering aluminum with a hint of hyacinth and its damp greenness. I added the flower (for the future) and redacted the gunpowder (for the future). Moonlight is harder to pin down but starts with a hint of peony and ends with a shovel handle and woollen mitt. Ice, as we know, is now a memorial, one of the last elemental clocks: melting its last gasp of vaporous blue mingling with the smell of a new and ancient mourning. The ice at the Oval, from the moon’s point of view, is an open bear trap it cavorts with. It practices calling forth the bones of things on the regular. Even those almost forgotten volvos at the bottom of the harbour roll arthritically when the moon is full. Fence posts; my bones. Waxing towards full, it’s trying hard to loosen the structure of things or remind us to be rivers. Everything about this season is loosened in this way. Days are tearing from their masts and blowing out to sea. A great change is afoot: hyacinth with its damp greenness buried deep in the future protesting the gunpowder buried along with it.
