Rainbows

As sometimes happens when we are walking our dog on the University of Alberta South Campus, a photo op comes along. And as I sometimes do, I snapped it with my phone camera, then sent the picture to my much-published poet friend, Anna Marie Sewell. And as Anna sometimes does, she returned a poem based on the photo. She focused on the geese.

And as I sometimes do, I pulled a few of my favorite lines from that poem (italicized to give credit where it is due), and worked them into one of my own. I focused on the rainbow:

Eyes follow the refraction:

a call to attention,

a suggestion that all

songs slide down from above….or

another on-ramp to the sky? 

a reminder that song also rises, 

reaches from the singer’s depths

to enrich the chorus all around, to feed soul-

hungry voyagers from their own resources, turn

their emptiness, their appetite,

into sustenance, the chance to feed

on their own need, to answer the question:

“Shall we be fertile?”

 What, then will

we bring to the table, chanters in the

choir that never ceases?

Then another friend, Shayne, came back with a poem on the Portuguese concept of "saudade, for which there is no complete translation in English, a poem that connected through both geese and rainbow as essential to the landscape, so  went back to work with lines from both Anna Marie and Shayne to push things along:

a constant

vague desire for something

lingering at the bright

union of rainbow reaching

down to the grass and the geese,

backs turned to the spilling

violent color behind;

or hiding just beyond

the ragged edges refracting

into the clouds that half-

helped create this call to attention:

the sense that we have not

exactly seen this all before

in all its rolling untamed

familiarity