this amber glow this topaz leaf light
stark against dark trunk no longer
silver under cloud cover cloud
blankets
harm, harm there
in storm swamp tents
rubble, rubble
thin kid arms pry up
helpless toss
white gull crowd lifts, cries, soars
re-settles green space here
Al Jazeera covers there
no hospice no hospital
scant food scant help
no way to heal those left
generations down their
bombed-out streets
Daphne Marlatt is an award-winning poet, dramatist, and novelist whose work has expanded the boundaries of Canadian writing for more than five decades. For her contributions to Canadian letters, she was awarded the Order of Canada in 2005, D. Litt. from the University of Western Ontario in 1996, DHumL. from Mount St. Vincent University in 2004, and D. Litt. from the University of British Columbia in 2026.
Questions and Answers
As a published writer, what are your tips or words of motivation for the aspiring poet?
Listen, LISTEN to language, to the words that arise in the act of writing a line—not only meaning associations, but also their sound and language-music resonance, their echoes. Language is social.
What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?
Clearly what’s going on, has been going on for far too long, in Palestine prompted both of these poems. Earlier this year, I read Colum McCann’s remarkable Apeirogon (2020), which details the friendship of two men, one Palestinian, the other Israeli, both of whom had daughters killed by the other side, and their individual and collective work for peace.