Editor’s Note
There is much to commend in Alexandra Dawson’s suite of poems here: their sparseness; the undercurrent of keenness beneath their deceptive simplicity; and their ability to distil the ordinary into a stark, revelatory moment. However, what stays with me is the quiet awareness of time, its mutability. In ‘The Blue Heron,’ verbs repeat lexically, and even when a new verb appears, it retains the present continuous tense from the older ones. In the first stanza alone: standing, watching, watching, darting, watching, evading, dancing. Time is thus made slippery and relentless: you are mired in the present, but the present also keeps coming at you, like the river, like “the minnows evading their murder.”
On the other hand, in ‘Still Life,’ time is more languid, loose-limbed. Coupled with the extensive use of the simple present tense, the poem’s repetition of ‘here’ almost makes the word an insistent ‘now,’ the spatial transforming into the temporal. Here we are. Here is. Here is. Here, again, is. The reader is always already ensconced in this present moment, brimming with possibility, a blank page waiting to be marked.
—Zainab Ummer Farook
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Down by the river, standing with you,
watching the blue heron under hypnosis,
watching its amber eyes darting, watching
the minnows evading their murder, the way
all small things are always just dancing
toward death.
By the river, with you, watching life being life.
Watching you, being you, in the sunlight,
in your green cap, in the hot belly of another
August, watching our lives slipping by,
like the minnows, the way time keeps
coming and coming and we can’t keep it,
and we can’t hold it.
And we wouldn’t if we could, but still,
somehow, there is this standing, shoulder
to shoulder, still, this sunlight, still,
this gleaming fistful of fish.
There is a coyote that
comes to me sometimes
and gnaws on the red pulp
of my heart. Don’t be alarmed,
she is a shy creature, and
probably just looking for
a snack. I offer myself freely
to the hungry wild. Eventually,
she spits it out, then leaves it,
like bruised fruit. There, I pluck
it up, and place it back inside
my body, which goes about
its day, scratching at the
confines of this cold
and civil world.
The snow on the field is a crisp blank
page, the geese have not yet arrived
to mark it with their hieroglyphic feet.
Here we are, at the precipice
of the New Year. Here is the winter light
chasing hours across the white linen
sheet of our bed, here is your hand,
close to mine, in this sun, in this shadow.
Here, again, is the field, the unbridled light
galloping across it, time stretched out
like the snow, like the page, like the white
of your reaching, reaching palm.
Acknowledgements
Image credits: © Michael Sowa. The Bear. Image, courtesy WikiArt.
“Comic surrealism” is the term given to the genre of paintings is which remind us the adult world is mostly make believe. Michael Sowa— like Philomena Cunk, Roy Andersson and the brothers Grimm— is a comic surrealist. Our choice of his painting was inspired by Alexandra’s first poem in the set. Yes, we are aware Alexandra’s poem refers to a heron, a blue one at that, and not a bear. Let the painting do its work, take a walk with the poem along the lake that’s all lakes, and we’re confident you’ll see things our way.
Author | Alexandra Dawson
Alexandra Dawson is a writer, wildlife photographer and ESL teacher from Toronto. She published a photo-poetry book entitled All these Living Things last year, which landed at #2 in nature poetry on Amazon’s Bestseller List. She has been published and interviewed by Humana Obscura and has four more publications forthcoming this year. More of her writing can be found on Instagram and Substack @alexdawcreates.
