Five Poems by Chad Norman

 

AFTER LEAVING A LOUSY JOB

 

Another new morning

comes with

another new education:

I can finally agree

the winter is over

as spring surrounds us,

the proof once more

being how a starling

feeds one of her young

among the impatient many,

quite like the opened dandelions

and the warm mothering sun.

FAR FROM ANY PAY-CHEQUE

 

I have

spent the day

observing

how the wind

removes

the night's snowfall

from the trees'

accommodating heights

in among

the wise boughs.

 

DARING TO LEAVE THE CAVE

Before

the Spring

is really

the new season

I feel

so alive

when

a great song

causes me

to weep,

& then

to smile.

THE BEAUTY OF A THISTLE

 

As the days of the week charge off somewhere

the early morning jaunts to the job

provide a mind pondering what it is

to know a blessing, to be blessed, to want

blessedness, almost thought after thought.

 

As each step up the hill changes the thoughts

to a curious surge throughout the body,

perhaps a feeling coming on as the sun

rises higher behind me, to allow the shade

to remain just that, and the warming light

to find and rest upon the purple of blooms.

 

New growth as summer ages, as the choice

now seems a wise one, the lawn needed cut,

I chose to do the backyard first, being higher,

and as the blades, one by one, were lowered

the choice to go around the young thistle

now understood, now being a site of beauty,

now being walked past, as a smile takes over

my face, and the dew dampens my old boots.

SIPPING A PALE ALE ONE SUMMER

I almost felt the joy

found when a breeze

is in the grass

under some trees

now finished shading

some kind of trouble

growing inside of the

body I have at 60,

taken from my eyes

and what they give

to forget I am aging,

I am becoming a man

unable to escape trust

in the mystery of being,

or this brief being alive.

Chad Norman lives beside the high-tides of the Bay of Fundy, Truro, Nova Scotia. 

He has given talks and readings in Denmark, Sweden, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, America, and across Canada.

His poems appear in publications around the world and have been translated into Danish, Albanian,  Romanian, Turkish, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Polish.

His collections are Selected & New Poems ( Mosaic Press), and Squall: Poems In The Voice Of Mary Shelley, is out from Guernica Editions. And Simona: A Celebration of the S.P.C.A. will be out early 2021 from Cyberwit.Net (India).