The Litter-Mate Titans

Our twin diminutive poodles
walk delicately on the trampled
snow of the forested trail conscious 
of the titans nearby coursing
through the woods, free of all
constraints, their person walking
alongside us, pleased at having
re-united these two massive
litter-mates, wondering if after
a two-year separation they recall
sharing a mother. The underfed 
one, given by the breeder to a
family with five young children
is rib-counting underfed, uncertain
what this newfound freedom to
roam portends, gently hesitant
but responsive. His brother swiftly
established his alpha position and
both suddenly indulge in a 
display of powerfully muscular
and audible bellicosity in a
playful spirit as our two black
slips of canine fluff observe
the ground rumbling exercise
and move in tentatively, partially
audacious, alternately timidly
to join the action with the fun of
danger appeal in the infectious
exuberance of the envied big boys.

Compute That

Compute That

Stars, Dust and Nebula in NGC 2170 Credit & Copyright: Russell Croman (Russell Croman Astrophotography) Explanation: When stars form, pandemonium reigns. A textbook case is the star forming region NGC 2170. Visible above are red glowing emission nebulas of hydrogen, blue reflection nebulas of dust, dark absorption nebulas of dust, and the stars that formed from them. The first massive stars formed from the dense gas will emit energetic light and winds that erode, fragment, and sculpt their birthplace. And then they explode. The resulting morass is often as beautiful as it is complex. After tens of millions of years, the dust boils away, the gas gets swept away, and all that is left is a naked open cluster of stars. If a sudden epiphany revealed the existence of a monumental phenomenon hitherto barely imagined in a guise not quite reflective of reality, but in fact still omnipresent and omniscient, would you believe it? An entity without discernible visual form, but yet a powerful, all-knowing presence whose purpose it is to guide and instruct and comfort? An indefinable, ephemeral, illusory presence, yet approachable and purposeful, humbly puissant in its orderly search for all the answers of all the queries ever to surface in the minds of humankind? An entity capable of forming and presenting a creatured landscape of great diversity and probity, beauty and utility - like a skilled craftsman creating a stage upon which life itself in its manifold dimensions exists. The dramas to which we are exposed; nature's atmospheric and geological upheavals, our actions and interactions, our curiosities and discoveries, our adventures and misadventures, ventured and circumscribed by that powerful force. It maintains a registry of all that occurs, leads and misleads us in benign and hazardous directions chides or rewards us with the consequences of our choices and remains itself inviolate and complacent in its feigned indifference: compute that.

Dunderheaded

Children subjected to medical experiments in Auschwitz.
[from The Pictorial History of the Holocaust, ed. Yitzhak Arad. New York: Macmillan, 1990]

Dunderheaded

It's a good trick if you can do it
and you can do it with winsome
sunny ways, placing the skills of
a thespian-born to the tedious task
of empathizing upon the grave
subject of genocide. The mullahs
of Iran set a rictus of scorn as they
contest the very notion of their
Aryan brethren plastering the
Holocaust into history while vowing
their effort will be far more effective.
On this solemn day of remembrance
Europe hastens to enrich its coffers
with Iranian trade and investment
just as surely as Europe's soil was
enriched with the byproduct of
carbonized Jewish lives consumed
in the Third Reich's crematoria.
But Canada has a junior Trudeau whose
official posting of commemoration
slides elegantly past awkward mention 
of Jews, while fulsomely lamenting
man's inhumanity to man. "On this
day", his statement waxes eloquently,
"we pay tribute to the memory of
the millions of victims murdered
during the Holocaust. We honour
those who survived atrocities at the
hands of the Nazi regime, and
welcome their courageous stories
of hope and perseverance", naming none
lest one give unintended offence.

On this day, we pay tribute to the memory of the millions of victims murdered during the Holocaust. We honour those who survived atrocities at the hands of the Nazi regime, and welcome their courageous stories of hope and perseverance.
The Holocaust is a stark reminder of the dangers and risks of allowing hate, prejudice, and discrimination to spread unchallenged. It also reminds us that silence must never be an option when humanity is threatened.
As we pause to educate ourselves and our families on the bitter lessons of the Holocaust, we also strengthen our resolve to work with domestic and international partners to continue defending human rights and condemning intolerance. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

This January Day

Nature was inspired to 
nudge away the sun this 
morning and install 
a pewter shield over 
the world to lazily sieve
dustings of fluffy snow
below. Midafternoon
brought an eerie silence
to the muffled forest
puffed and primped with
snow. Clumps and clusters
sparkled dimly from
evergreen boughs as an
early twilight eclipsed 
this January day.

Never Forgotten

This is the day of sacred trust
when the international community
has pledged to observe the
unspeakable tragedy of a people
whose presence on Earth was
selectively extinguished by state
decree and inhumanity on a
genocidal scale of unmitigated
horror that left a postwar world
reeling in disbelief. Never to forget
forever on guard, a recurrence
forbidden by all that is human
sacred and history-haunting. This
is the day that a gracious and
smiling Pope welcomes the head
of state of another Aryan nation
that threatens the existence of a
Jewish state, with annihilation
by yet another triumphalist 
ideology. While Europe, the 
charnel house of its Jews, now
awaits anxiously the imminent
opportunity to open the doors
of trade and profit to that
same nuclear-driven travesty.

 

The Learning Curve

Hats? Gloves? Socks? Table legs?
Computer mouse? Zippers ... destroyed.
Books ... masticated thoughtfully.
They are ingenious in their constant
infuriating habits discovering
myriad ways to infuriate us with
their insistence on chewing foreign
objects not known to render taste
or nutritional value to any living
creature. A result of which is often
injury and sick bay. Yet to scold 
these creatures is an injustice for
they seek to earn our affection and
do so not inappropriately by posing
as little laughable clowns. They are 
an astounding pair of small black imps
impervious to instruction they view
no value in obeying. And they
represent an "in" crowd all their
own. They have their focus and
their inestimable values for they 
are incorrigibly infatuated with
impulsive inquisitiveness; in the
process completely disarming us.

 

Enlightenment

He cuts a dashing figure, at least
that's our opinion, as he leapfrogs
over his twin and crouches
temptingly before her uttering
challenges to compel her
cooperation in their dazzling
display of acrobatic pyrotechnics;
their capacity to outmanoeuvre
and taunt one another leading
to impressive leaps and bounds
of surpassing grace. Her response
is readily gauged; playtime that
her companion initiates is so
predictable and boring. Nothing
compared to the wondrous high-wire
acts of impulsive bravado venturing
nigh on levitation as their bodies
become weightless with the 
compulsion to challenge nature's 
limitations on gravitational 
conceit that she proposes and he
opposes. And who was it who has
claimed that gender role-playing
represents a social convention?

Slaughtering The Peace

Slaughtering The Peace

In the still solitude of the winter
woods a hush hangs on the landscape
of dark tree trunks standing like
sentry posts amid great pine forest
giants anchored firmly by an
accumulated snow pack sifted
generously with fresh-fallen snow.

The sky, too, hovers, a mirror
image of the ground billowed with
snow, shimmering pearl-grey,
silver, white. The silence suddenly
broken by a coarse, hoarse racket
of deafening dimensions. A murder
of crows slaughtering the peace.

They shift and shuffle around the
prickly, lofty spires of two-masted
pines whose size bespeak their
majesty, dignity offended by the
rudeness of the invading horde;
cackling, croaking, lifting their
black wings outspread like phantoms
circling the landscape of the sky.

The Crystalized Wood

The Crystalized Wood

The Sky has rained frozen tears
for days, mourning the passage
of yet another year, bringing
us closer to old agedness.
How peculiar its empathy, for
we feel no such sorrow.

As we move through the woods
they too weep, but their grief
expresses their loss of twigs,
branches, limbs brought to
the snow-cushioned ground
with weight of snow and ice.

Tree trunks are glassed with ice
swaddling. The day mild enough
so droplets of melt move under
the ice sheathing like dark bugs
crawling down the trunk.

Finger-thick ice has brought
green boughs to utter decline
littering the forest floor. Above,
silently cruises the dark form
of a lonely crow. No wind, but
damp air and vanishing ice fog.

The sky, a bright pewter awning
has relented, halted its freezing
assault, and presents slivers of blue,
and there, the struggling sun. The
weeks-long frozen creek has
won its reprieve, runs free, burbling.

Shivering Delight

Shivering Delight

The sky is generously dimpled and flocked
with layers of silver and white clouds,
nicely scalloped in a prize-winning design.
Nature takes a bow, on this winter day.
Some wag has taken bows of scarlet silk
and appended them to a few of the frozen
forest trees, a fey nod to Christmas-in-the-woods.
The denizens are not particularly amused,
however light the holiday mood, however.

The counterbalancing wind is sharply avid
in its icy probes, hungry to bite bare flesh.
The exquisite pain of its pointed, icy blasts
negating the peaceful beauty of the snow-capped
trees. Atop the dark, unadorned spire of a
long-dead pine sits the black figure of the
forest's cadaver care-taking contingent, its
beady eyes quick to identify interlopers.

Ferocious wind gusts in the upper atmosphere
part the clouds and shafts of sunlight beam
down sweetly on the forest floor, threading
between winter-bare boughs, illuminating the
crystalline snow, glowing generous light without one
scintilla of comforting warmth. Shivering delight.

 

 

 

Yiddish Gothic

Shtetl-born, the era of the
transition from Polish pogroms
to the Aryan Nazi Third Reich
establishing its death camps where
no inconvenient furor of protest
was anticipated, the presciently
few sailed off to America and
there finding no streets paved
with gold, men took humble
employment in the trade of
peddling; broken furniture,
trinkets, schmata, and live
chickens from farm to market.
Hard work for pittance pay,
while women laboured in
sweat shops now exploiting
poverty-stricken women in
the Philippines. He was the stern
unbending paterfamilias their
children enraged easily and at
their own risk. She was the gossipy
meek balabusta vainly stretching
hope to make ends meet. Their
struggle to survive taught their
offspring what the parents knew
by experience; the world was an
unlovely place with few beckoning
opportunities. The second generation
adeptly grasped those elusive
chances fatalistically inuring
themselves against failure
attracting to their worldly success
the envy and the enmity of the 
latest crop of anti-Semitic haters.

Dr. Bill Freedman Nature Reserve at Prospect High Head, NS (Photo by NCC

His Legacy

Today is his birth date, the
annual anniversary of the day
our mother gave birth to my
younger brother. Last year was
his 65th birthday, the age when
social convention has it one
retires. He did indeed retire 
last year, stopped teaching
and suspended research, but not
his writing, in a frenzy to
complete two manuscripts for
publication; his legacy to
nature, along with the
conservation area named in
his honour. He lived to see
neither of his devotions so
noted for posterity. So today
is his birth date, the younger
brother I helped diaper and
nurture. HE is gone, his memory
among those who knew his
passions and his humour, lingers.

Bring On The Clowns

Their spidery-slender legs
akimbo in a comical riot of
propulsive motion, the twin black
imps revel in their racing liberty
and the exquisite rhapsody in
the plump white comforter
beckoning on trails across the
forest floor. A brisk wind whips
the atmosphere to an icy chill.
Without pup-sized boots these 
tiny dogs would be denied their
treasured woodland romps in 
the deepest chill of a winter
landscape. With the boots they
wallop the frigid air in a madcap
frenzy of exuberance, now and
again glancing back to assess
our tardy progress. Returning 
when a shrill "treat!" is trilled 
then setting off again at breakneck 
speed down valleys, up hills
along connecting flats, their
personal natural precincts.

You Promised

We were just children, barely
into our teen years when you
decided to take charge. You were
confident and I was your confidant
a natural selection in a brace of
shared longing. You were quick
to promise just about everything
I would ever want, the moon
and the stars blinking down on
us during night-time summer
strolls would all be mine, you
would make that a certainty. I
really had no wish to have the
moon and the stars, preferring
them to remain in the firmament
where we could admire them any
time we liked. Even now as we
walk under a night sky, a lifetime
later at each other's side
we have one another and a full
sixty-five years of time together
all because you kept your promise.

 

Conveying The Message

He's an incorrigible little fellow
given to canine histrionics, most
amazing of all his transformation into
an alarm clock. By some intemperate
alchemy of subconscious entitlement
he presumes to demand his imagined
privileges. And nor is he alone in
his penchant to grouse and insist
for his twin is equally culpable. They
have worked out a pantomime in
their scheming little brains to move
me from the lethargy of afternoon rest
when they are bored with their own.
He leaps from my resting side to the
kitchen to be stationed at the counter
in anticipation of my busyness there.
Repeatedly emitting sharp barks of
command while his sister undertakes
to swat the newspaper from my
dozing hands, each determined to
convey the dire urgency of providing
them with dinner to revive their
flagging energy post our long and
energetic daily woodland ramble.

Windy Twilight

On these sullenly overcast
days, twilight barely bothers
to retreat preferring to be
stationed on standby to ease
swift return long before its
lurking presence is even
detected. Often enough it
strikes a conspiracy with the
wind the better to implement
stealth tactics, for when
wind brusquely enters a
sleeping forest its truculence
is soon apparent; bared treetops
lurching dazedly, apparitions
of impending terror viewed
in darkened twilight haze
urging all those who linger
there to speedily depart.


 

Softly The Day

Through the morning hours
a luxuriance of grey clouds
released a languid fall of snow
muffling the sounds of birds
welcoming the day. As dawn
wallowed in densely cushioned
comfort, the clouds withdrew
leaving the remainder of the day
to the imperious golden glory
of the sun. In the forest all
that is still sleeps within the
white comforter. Here and there
scintillating veils of snowdrift
are gently nudged from perches
aloft on pine branches to
pattern the pristine forest floor.
Robins congregate along a
frigid woodland creek lazy
with chill, hunting caddisfly
larvae. This is an idyll of peaceful
solitude in an oblivious world.

Seeking The Source

Anciently arcane? How about a
time before time existed? As for 
place, and being, none at all. 
None, as in nothing, blankly absent
existence. The teeming presence
of atoms and gases, chemicals, ice 
and dust that powerful telescopes
visualize and present that we are
not alone in the Universe have
taken the place of the void that
once was. So this is the ultimate
mystery: What propelled existence
into being, what force beyond the
insipid imagination of mere
humankind initiated existence
out of total absence, to produce
an expanding Universe, its
diversity of forms and its yawning
endless timelessness of being?

Landscape in White

A persistent, flickering mist
of snow falls on the naked forest
canopy, minuscule droplets
flash-frozen like stars falling
through the sieve of the lowering
sky divesting itself of its slight
burden of beauty and light.
A languid breeze directs the mist
in white plump drifts to furnish
the winter stage. That is the
aesthetic of the landscape. This
is the practical reality: It is
icy, damp and windy, but our
eyes capture the exquisite arras
as our boots bite deeply into
the plush comforter tending
the sleeping winter forest.

The Departures Gate

A poet in his tender hours of literary
elegance, he was also an intellectual 
whose acquired wisdom he generously
shared in opinion pieces that awed
reflecting experience and an intimate
awareness of humankind's failings
liberally leavened by a deeply
mordant wit. His acerbic avuncularity
gained him favour as a raconteur of
extraordinary dimension, and as a
sought-after political pundit. With so
many creative and practical insights
at his command his published books
enjoyed wide appeal and the oeuvre
of this man of letters whom history
claimed as one of its own was peerless.
When he died, much, much too
soon, a pall of regrets engulfed his
colleagues and admirers. Did that
sad news hit the media? Just his
misfortune to kick off this mortal 
coil on a day claimed by a pop 
celeb in a departure of poor timing.

The Glib Pitch

Not to be rude, he was after all
only performing a type of public
service I did myself for years
as a volunteer for charitable
groups, knocking on doors
soliciting donations for
health research, so I politely
listen to his slick telephone
spiel while thinking bad timing
since this is the cusp of a
new year, the old one barely
out the door and donors'
funding fairly depleted. His
well practised verbal coersion
endless and my patience not
I advised my caller of my
unpreparedness to pledge
then and there. At the canvassed
door some people are naturally
welcoming while others are
brusquely disinterested and
the volunteer faces them all.
Over a distance the caller
becomes an emphatic bully
sweeping away negative response
to forge on with his intent to
convert those who resist; a
cowardly adversary emerges.

 

Weather Alert

It is a wet dishrag of a day.
Dismal it is, grey and soggy.
On the sidewalks singly and
in  groups vacant-eyed people
wander aimlessly, coffee cups
in hand, a desultory scene of
urban anomie. Trucks bully
cars and transit buses speed by
empty of passengers. The sky
is a bleak spectacle of metallic
fusion in a downdrift of
persistent rain. The winter
snowpack is disintegrating
in this January thaw. The two
rivers alongside the city --
wide ribbons of churling grey
with gaunt defoliated trees
lining their banks speak sad
volumes of de-energized
landscapes. A silent air of
miserable discontent breathes
disconsolate damp dejection.

 

Winter's Guests

How quaintly unexpected that 
a committee of doves would
assemble a quorum as a tranquil
symbol of their faith and trust in
those who live in the home whose
porch they have assembled upon.
Five pairs no less whose habit
has been winter-established
to dine out in the company of
cardinals and nuthatches
chickadees and juncos, their
endless source of seeds to be
had for the taking, and they
unquestioning, do. A minyan
of gender equality expressing
gratitude in an unforgiving season.


 

 

Lèse majesté 

One has earned his state of
magnificent arrogance as a 
powerful and majestic force of
nature at her imperious command.
The other imagines itself a
natural force making up in
exuberant impudence what nature
failed to endow it with, but
modesty and humbleness does
not figure in the life of a tiny
black furred creature of the
wild who imagines that all it
surveys represents prime fodder
for its exploitation. Aeolus, in
contrast, a noble and consummate
marshal of the winds truly is
king of all his blowhard subjects
ensuring they remain within the
bounds given them lest they 
trespass their allowances. The
juvenile squirrel on the other
hand cheekily makes familiar
with the deity and there is no
agency of divine retribution
to give it reason to pause.