Our warm neighbourhood gathering of word-lovers returns April 19, in the stillness between Good Friday and Easter Morning, to ponder and reflect. What images, sensations or sounds bounce back? What poems and stories spark deep thoughtful ponderings? Come and share a favourite song, poem, or short tale of 3-5 minutes written by someone other than yourself. Or just come to listen and enjoy!
After Hours is a monthly neighbourhood coffeehouse with songs, stories, poems and prose on a rotating theme. All are welcome to listen or join in. Note: this is not a literary open mic. Though local authors do participate, we are all readers sharing work we enjoy and admire. We meet on the third Saturday of most months at 1:30 pm at Churchmouse Bookshop in St Mary’s, Oak Bay, 1701 Elgin Rd., and are hosted by Cynthia Woodman Kerkham and Yvonne Blomer.
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“Reflections” is April’s theme
Reflections are something “thrown back by a surface of light, heat or sound without absorbing it.” To see your own reflection in a still pond. And it is to ponder, consider, think, rethink. It can be introspection, to look in and to look back, which captures both definitions: to see how we shimmer back to ourselves in light and thought.
As Denise Levertov writes in “Variations on a Theme by Rilke” (The Book of Hours, Book I, Poem I, Stanza I)
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me – a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
The act of standing in the presence of the day, and the self, offers a moment for reflection. In this poem, Mark Turcotte reflects both in water and on life, to an astonishing end:
REFLECTION
for Isaiah DrewBack when I used to be Indian
I am twenty-six maybe twenty-seven
years old, exhausted, walking the creek
that bends through the hills
down into the clattering mesquite.
Along the muddy bank
I search for any sign
of my family. Footprints, feathers,
blood. A smoldering campfire
sours in my nose. Mojados.
Yellow pencil shavings curl
in the warm ash. Poetas.
A circle of Sun floats
and spreads upon the water.
I step in.
Murky bottom rises
over my boots, swirls
and swallows up the light.
As I kneel to speak
a long, black bird bursts
from my throat.