Lightsinthenight

Moving right along from thoughts

of orca feeding down the food chain

to aboriginal dancers moving the crowd

with superman & zorba

to the mass graves of Canada

out of the local news, finally

gone international

i was standing in the back field

watching the green folds of light

draped across the sky, thinking

of the hems of the robes of

the priests and the nuns

wondering about divinity

universe of mystery

sometimes the questions flock

far beyond the reaches of our ability

to make answers

sometimes just sharing the questions

sometimes just making the reach

not alone this time, but

in company

sometimes the past and present fold

and i am lost between

a cold back field gazing through starlight

and a small book in a small shop

somewhere

i have never been

sometimes the headlines arrive

leaving skid marks across the heart

Published online September 01, 2010

I first became aware of CV2 as a woman-friendly space, and in trying my luck with submitting my work, found CV2’s editors to be amenable to the sort of woman, and the sort of poet, I am. Whether social critique or soaring love poem, or — as is often the case — both simultaneously, CV2 has made space for my work more often than any other journal in Canada. It is also a place I can show up with a friend, as with my interview with Daniel David Moses in the “Writers who swing both ways” issue, to share interesting discussions beyond the race-class-community and genre walls that so often demarcate Canadian conversations. I admit to a sentimental attachment, too, given CV2’s home base at the sacred centre of my specific universe.

—Joanne Arnott