Beware silence
distrust stillness
things that lie beneath the surface
do not seem
Death leaps up sudden
like trout from quiet water
snatching flies mid-air
or a car over-leaping the banks
of a sidewalk
pedestrians scattered
mid-stream
Questions and Answers
What inspired “Small Furies”?
“Small Furies” came to me while walking down a street after work one day. I remembered an anecdote by a friend of mine how he’d heard about a pedestrian killed by a car that swerved onto a sidewalk. That story worked its way into my poem.
What poetic techniques did you use in “Small Furies”?
This poem, unlike much of my poetry, is short and concise. I didn’t work on it very much. It came to me spontaneously in more or less the state it’s in today. It consists mostly of a single metaphor built around water images.
This poem “Small Furies” originally appeared in Black Writing in Canada. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 182 (Autumn 2004): 29.
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