James Deahl – Felix Girard

Misty Morning, Sarnia Harbour

No other walkers in sight and few squirrels
to share this mist drifting off our harbour.
Ghost ships at loading docks are scarcely there,
the other shore’s nearly invisible.
Sounds sleep swaddled as if nothing dared breath;
in the moist heart of stillness, no bird sings.

Almost every place one steps, unmarked graves
of Indigenous people, early French
settlers, cry out wordlessly, desperate
to relate their tales of injustice
where two civilizations collided.
Just like today in Sudan and Gaza,
we’ve made our earth a living cemetery.

© James Deahl

James Deahl was born in Pittsburgh during 1945,  and grew up in that city as well as in and around the Laurel Highlands of the Appalachian Mountains. He moved to Canada in 1970. He is the author or editor of over thirty books (mostly poetry) and is the author of fifteen poetry chapbooks. A cycle of his poems is the focus of a one-hour American television special, Under The Watchful Eye. As a literary critic, Deahl has written about Milton Acorn, Raymond Souster, and Bruce Meyer, as well as sixteen leading poets of the Confederation Period, and he has presented university lectures on Alden Nowlan, Robert Kroetsch, Canadian Postmodernism, and the People’s Poetry tradition.