Poetry: Chad Norman

Chad Norman

WILFRED AND THE HARDWOODS

None of

all that was said

means anything

anyway

if I wish

to hide from it,

from him,

a past so long ago.

What does mean

and always has

finds one spot

to survive each

and every lovable season.

In there

he is long gone.

In there

I don't miss him

or think about him

at all;

a father

has one chance,

the small parental forest

I know,

I love, has many.

As I navigate

the ice and snow

walking a path

I have made,

I hear both my father

and the voices

of the trees

I have known

are for me to hear.

To take guidance from

about how

I am the older man now,

and this living 

and this aging

goes beyond

the failure of a father,

leaving me a happiness

in the songs

of one day's melting ice. 

***

FAREWELL TO 2020

for Mohammed

Somehow I endure

the waiting, and watch

as the clock's hands part,

the birth of a new year.

One second afterwards...

I sigh deeply, loudly,

actually manage

a strange rapid grin.

And come to understand,

to feel the essence of

every immediate blessing

relief begins to offer.

January 1, 2021

Casa Harris

Truro, N.S.

***

THE NUT AND THE BOLT, 2021

for Ernest Asante

At work in the endless warehouse

another new job taken on,

the widest broom in hand,

comfortable dust on floors

between the storied walls

where it is my job to sweep up

what's been left by the workers

who were told their jobs are over.

I feel them, their families, their losses

everywhere in the talkative air,

product they gave to long gone

taken from their town's economy,

all of them left to handle

such a shock, removal of an income,

all the promises money can make.

As each push begins to form a line

all of it what the bristles find

in both cracks and smooth sections,

a line appearing more and more

made up of broken concrete, old tape 

once placed to designate walkways,

dirt left by fork-truck trips, empty

pop-cans, lengths of banding used to

hold a variety of full pallets together,

and unbelievably in a spot easily unseen

a shiny unused nut, there alone,

causing me to believe it was forgotten.

I rest the broom against a railing

part of a protective guard, painted

yellow over the years, go down on

one knee to pick it up, and stop

the hand holding it to make a decision

about theft: am I or am I not guilty

by putting it in a pocket?

Another choice is offered the same moment

to place the nut in the open palm

of my other gloved hand, when chosen

I realize not only forgotten

it will never know a bolt

and the threads it will never

be wound through, like some

rare relationship being started,

required to hold together a building,

the essential dreams of a new owner

and his open, virus-free company.

***

NOTES ON KNOWING WHERE THE NEST IS

What I am up against, if anything,

 when change slows my search, 

for better or worse doesn't matter

when a tree had no leaves

and now it is heavy with them,

keeping me from spotting it

as I liked to do during the snow,

keeping me from seeing the boy

with a loud voice walking the poodle

going by it, going under it, knowing

nothing about what the Spring does

when it is time to rebuild somewhere else.

Now that hardwoods can hide the sources

of so many different irresistible sounds

the play on the mind, to fool it, begins,

an occasional event during my visits

all of them Winter or Spring to see

or hope to see what I thought was

a bobbing black feathered head

above what appeared to be the mother

but turned out to be a black branch,

the type a fir tree gives to shadows.

No matter what kind man stands

and watches, thinking there will be no

young again this year, a kind man

far below on the sidewalk where he

has grown comfortable with little

the nest wants him part of, even

though it won't be the one

where any young break through,

the rarity of eggs being any guarantee

a new member will join the family,

will join his hope of seeing or knowing

where the new nest is, the one hidden

he hasn't found yet, the one noisy

they don't want even him to know about,

to have any expectations it will be

where mortality ends in a hungry young beak.

***

SHY CROWS

To have a scene

where a fly

wakes from recent cold

or a wire holds up

a family of seven.

I call and call

as the spot draws closer...

hoping for a visit

on a day leaves are red.

Seeing is a return

into how many come

collecting this time.

***

Brief bio 

Chad Norman lives beside the high-tides of the Bay of Fundy, Truro, Nova Scotia. 

He has given talks and readings in Denmark, Sweden, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, America, and across Canada.

His poems appear in publications around the world and have been translated into Danish, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Polish.

 

His collections are Selected & New Poems (Mosaic Press), and Squall: Poems In The Voice Of Mary Shelley, is out from Guernica Editions. And Simona: A Celebration of the S.P.C.A. will be out early 2021 from Cyberwit.Net (India).

---

Setu, March 2021