Dear niece of mine, you honour me
with your remembrance
fifty-two years now I’m gone
from your plain of reality
but you’ve kept me at your side

the gratitude you now show you me
by attributing me a role
in your lyric life with words
draws me to reach down from way up here

do not imagine your venture into poetry
is strange news for me
for I have witnessed the budding intrigue
in the new filly, rising on her wobbly legs
then the strengthening through the years
and smiled at the refreshment of my own memories

but the awareness that I inspired a child
of Margaret’s, to follow with her own pen
makes me feel like a Canadian Poet Laureate

how I longed to warn you, also, of the toughness
you would need over personal sensitivities to endure
in the craft you’ve chosen
or that has chosen you

Parlours with armchairs appeal, for you and I to chat
but better for us, perhaps, to explore
timeless nature as our meeting path
through birch and pine, or meadows
where gorse and lupine grow
or along the coast of British Columbia

I both frown and chuckle over the changes
in stylistics you advise me of today
the disposition against extensive use of rhyme
adverbs and adjectives
in truth, I admit

I do not understand this prejudice.

Were I to describe the flora of Manitoba
or Heaven now, the richest landscape fathomed
without these would cut me close
but I would find alternate methods to paint, never fear

the technical machinery of production and print
never a constant, nor even the simple implement
feather pen or stylo, or the square pegs you hit now to make type
that lands on screens before your face, (you see, I have been watching)
do not alter what we do and who we are
so though the mode of capture wears strange colours
and forms for me now, the written word is still
our common ground, beyond our blood one
the written word that rules all poets

Would you - niece - as my modern-day mentor
guide me now to master the tools I’d need?
That beast you describe as a "computer"
lurks foreign and ominous.

But poetry. Oh poetry. The passion of it.
Whether sonnets or this item you call haiku.

Yes, this bank officer was re-born each evening
he slipped into the den, back home, or strolled the backlands
to immerse himself in his true vocation
and never defeated by the challenge of the labour
or the reader’s result
but whetted to work harder to achieve

She was my other bride, now widow
to whom I left my all

That my legacy was shared with you
and Margaret's other children
and my humble published volumes continue
to speak, not just in family cabinets
but in the universities
has graced me with the benefit
we likely all seek, we who write -
immortality

Thank you my niece, and sister in the field
would that we could one day meet

02/16/2004

Author's Note: This is my imaginary response to my poem To My Blood Muse, recently posted, for my very real Great-Great-Uncle Alex, a Western Canada poet, in whose home my mother lived for a time, in her teens

Posted on 02/16/2004
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