Cutting through the noise of words

“. . . Poetry cuts through the noise of other words, like a prayer. It wakes us. It finds us. It witnesses life simultaneously at its most conscious and its most hidden. A poem is always about what it means to be alive and mortal.” – Anne Michaels (from a Poetry in Voice* interview)

Born on this date in 1958, Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist who has won dozens of international awards and whose work has been translated and published in nearly 50 countries. The recipient of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas and the Canadian Authors' Association Award, she also is an award winner         for her fiction, especially the highly lauded novel Fugitive Pieces.

  

Since October 2015, Michaels has served as poet laureate of Toronto.  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Michaels’,

  

Flowers

There’s another skin inside my skin

that gathers to your touch, a lake to the light;

that looses its memory, its lost language

into your tongue,

erasing me into newness.

Just when the body thinks it knows

the ways of knowing itself,

this second skin continues to answer.

In the street – café chairs abandoned

on terraces; market stalls emptied

of their solid light,

though pavement still breathes

summer grapes and peaches.

Like the light of anything that grows

from this newly-turned earth,

every tip of me gathers under your touch,

wind wrapping my dress around our legs,

Your shirt twisting to flowers in my fists.

*Read more about Poetry In Voice at http://www.poetryinvoice.com/about
 

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