Emily Carr Interlude

My, haven't I been gone a long, long time!  Sorry for the silence.  I've been traveling and will soon be traveling again but in the meantime I wanted to share a poem from a slim volume of poetry I found when I was on Vancouver Island recently.  It's called Emily and is written by Florence McNeil*.  Ms. McNeil has "translated her own love of the West Coast and its rain forests, seas and mountains into poetry based on the life and work of Emily Carr."  

Emily Carr is one of my favorite artists and I seem to grow to love her paintings more and more as the years pass.  I thought that Ms. McNeil did a most admirable job of writing in (what I imagine) is Emily Carr's voice.

Sundays

It is not the surface I want

not the ocean with the sunday sailors

the harbour where ladies

boldly (in summer)

consider their ankles

or the straw hats 

that float

in the placid inner harbour

I want     like Alice to go through

the glass

come out on the other side

of respectability

display barnacles kicking

on the schooners' bottoms

show the insolent energy of seaweed

tell the languishing ladies and gentlemen

of Victoria     in their sacred departures

there is violence

florid and beautiful

beneath their holy excursions.

*Florence McNeil, Emily, (Toronto/Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, 1975, print).

I will try, Dear Reader, to post a few snaps of where I've been and share with you what I've been up to, before I leave for Southern Africa early in October.