Two Poems

by Fran Westwood

 
Portrait of My Mother as a Heron Another October, & the river dressed in a soft shirtof lily pads. You among them, a worker’s broad, greyed back. Mother, a verbanother word for giving. You watchmy limbs quivering, unsheltered on the vast liquid surface. Silver & brown fins curving below. You, stillwatching every space where your children once nested, learning everything from you. How to lift off,how to touch the trees & hug water again with fearful wings.A dry leaf drops, dust edges wrinkle the mirror. For years, youtelling me about myself & still nowin brief visitations in my solitary canoeour fear-crowned, complicated faces, looking back in feathers from the shallows & the deep
Why I never planted garlic A walk by your yard & I notice through piled straw long stems stretching in the early air. These bodies having waited all winter emerge from the dead, lithe & green. I didn’t sow garlic in my own garden. I didn’t …
 
 
 

Fran Westwood is an emerging Canadian poet whose work was shortlisted for the ROOM 2020 poetry prize and has been published or is forthcoming in various journals including Contemporary Verse 2, The Hopper, Prairie Fire, The Night Heron Barks, Inanna's Canadian Women Studies Journal, Recenter Press, Stay Journal, and Sunlight Press. Fran writes, grows vegetables, and works in mental health and addictions in Guelph, Ontario, traditional territory of the Anishnaabek peoples, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. You can find her online at @fran.westwood (Instagram).