John B. Lee, Poetry

Award Winning Canadian Poet & Writer

Poet Laureate of Brantford & Norfolk County

Writing & Poetry

I Too Can Show the Way

Where would you lead me friend?
into what future
and from what past
and by what light guide
and for what purpose go
and to what end
and with what faith …
for if I follow
where the hills are hard
and if I cross cruel rivers
on the way
stepping stone by stone
between the foams and froths
that break the water’s voice
and if I look to see
who comes behind
by my example then
we share a path
and breathe to climb
and step against the slope
to see the valley’s hard green ease
beyond a blind horizon’s call
and if you’d named the dangers
one by one
and sent those glories free before
how then
to temper knowing
if I do not touch the stones the rivers touch
how then to look upon the map
and say
see there, we went together
I too can show
the way.

The poem, "I Too Can Show the Way," is from the book,
The Echo of Your Words Has Reached Me, Mekler and Deahl 1998
and it reappears in my selected poems, The Half-Way Tree. It was written while my son Dylan and I spent three weeks trekking and tenting on Baffin Island, crossing the Arctic circle on foot. I originally recited it on tv as part of a year end program called, Canadian Heroes, and it is under consideration having made a short list for inclusion in an anthology of poems dedicated to the leadership of President Obama.
Copyright property of the author *this book of poems was written in the Canadian Arctic

Bigger Love

every baby born
is born into the promise
of a bigger love
but there are
I am told
children in the Middle East
who can discriminate
the sound
of every gun
from far within the blast horizon
of their home
and rubbled on the wind
every mortar, every cannon
comes to scatter minds
every pyrotechnic boom
they know by name
but they are startled at
the thunder
when weather isn’t war

and also here
on Black Out Thursday
the children of Toronto
wondered
what the stars were
haunting the urban darkness
of their newly visible heaven

those o’er-arching
galaxies
to which they had been
blind till then
burned through the black
like embers of a distant fire
old autumn lashings
of a dying time

come daughters, I am
Lebanon
come sons
I’m blood lines of a crimson sand
come darlings
we’ve the soul to kill
the heart to break
the mind to sever
from its hand

what is the noise
we make
when language fails
the mouth
that poem is a
scream
the ink that sends
the breath to school
shatters at the cuff
and walks
with ragged bone
and tattered voice

"Bigger Love"
which begins, "every child is born/ to the promise of a bigger love" has been frequently anthologized and it appears in my latest book of poems, Dressed in Dead Uncles, (Black Moss Press, 2010).

The Old Man's Hour

at the end
my father felt
mostly the fear of falling to
the unforgiving floor
and so we walked together
his hand
fogging my wrist
like a greying darkness
I could reach through
to find the weight of bone
the blue moment
the almost reified shadow
of his soul
and in that sadness
in that coming on
of the strength of sorrow
in the gown-gap
of his johnny shirt
and at what is now
become an old man's hour
let us call it
the ghost of woe
of each footstep's lamentation
in those slipper sounds
of a weak-hearted moving
what the oat pail wants
banged empty
what the water drum
wishes with the going still
of its shining meniscus
dulled by spill
in a dirt-dead field
where the stone boat
dragged all the dry thirst
of a long-forgotten day
where I'm once again weathered in sheep

and now, with father four years gone
his brother
sits tethered to a chair
his forehead port-stained
by knock-out
in a hospital hall
his wrist
cracked in a cast

I'm left grieving the oak
in the otherwise empty clearing
that storm-trimmed
monumental wind-loss
that comes in the night
when we are not there
but dreaming

"The Old Man's Hour"
is from a work in progress called, The Widow's Land. It appears in CV2 anniversary issue and in the book, Tough Times: When the Money Doesn't Love Us (Black Moss Press, 2010).

An essay from 'Left Hand Horses'

I am born in an age of assassins. My childhood martyred almost all the heroes that I’ve had. Forbidden means to desperate ends have stolen every voice I’ve loved as best. When petty monsters took up guns and shot the poets of my youth, the papers mourned an old romance. As it was once while Whitman wept for Lincoln or we grieved the later loss of our own McGee at home, who knew another time would come to name the sudden dead as ours. I was but a callow baseball-playing lad when Miss Myrtle Downie closed the classroom door to tell us that America had murdered hope. And then we saw the film. We witnessed horror come on Sunday to a Dallas basement jail. That was the wincing day when I turned twelve. Then Memphis woke us weeping with the news of fatal balconies. We’d grieved, we thought, enough, until we fell like kitchen dishes dropped from shock too great to bear. The brilliant brother broke upon the floor as well. The list is overlong. It will not end. My younger heart surrounds a tragic hour. I talk of fallen names. I nudge at corpses and am saddened by a private grief for public shame. Who kills these men kills innocence. I remember J.F.K.. I remember Martin Luther King. I remember Robert F.. I remember them all alive when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed. I remember them well and fond and lost my adolescence blinking in their funeral smoke. That was the time John Lennon sang my life awake. Imagine that, this death of dream, with unanticipated mourning yet to come.