Edmonton Poetry Festival
Various locations. Thu, Sun, Apr 23-26. Info/full schedule: www.edmontonpoetryfestival.com.

Being exposed to creativity in a safe and comfortable environment can turn even a confirmed coach potato into a prodigious consumer of culture.

Well, at least that’s the reasoning SEE Magazine was using when we asked three writers featured in Edmonton’s Poetry Festival to submit small poems for publication in our comfortable pages in advance of the festival. Do these short writings arouse the artist within — or at least the receptive listener? Give them a read and let us know.

If winter was a poet...
An interlaced ghazal
Concrete parkade, chain link fence rusting in the cold rain. Piling
in wind-swept corners: fallen branches, a handful of poems.
    ... on a dark day, when the air felt like clay ...
Howl of leaves through the alley, rattling the metal cage of a dumpster.
Cold feet beneath a shopping cart; a handful of poems.
        ... this broken room, open to the sky ...
The empty rocking chair. Ice growing long on the window panes;
snow clings to frozen planters, a lone sunflower, a handful of poems.
    ... the wandering roots of winter’s aspen ...
Wet grass and melting snow.
A handful of poems.

—Patrick M. Pilarski (first published in The Antigonish Review, issue #156, 2009). Pilarski is currently a Ph.D. candidate in computer engineering at the University of Alberta and co-edits The DailyHaiku, an international journal of short poetry.

Between the Silences
It happens between the silences, amid whispers, flipping papers,
    coughs and bows.
It happens, they say, after previous consultation, and with due
    consideration.
It happens on papers in assessments, reports and addendums.
It happens between lawyers, social workers, judges.
Between the silences it  happens; families are split, children
    discarded,
Fathers and mothers appear and disappear, the director becomes
      parent. 
It happens with grown-up words like: custody, guardianship,
    father unknown or absent,
mother served or signed release, supervision order, child in care,
    status extended.
It happens while children play in courthouse hallways.
A child’s future determined in the time it takes to say:
So ordered.

—Diane Buchannan (from Between the Silences, Frontenac House, 2005). Buchannan retired from nursing at the age of 50, returned to university, and began writing. She lives on a horse farm near Edmonton.

Paratactical Manoeuvres
bottom line  line
of blood in the sand            /dead
                                    line
more ghosts on the landscape
s shifting sands:  imperial vision
a stone
            not atone
meant

—Douglas Barbour (from Fragmenting Body etc, NeWest Press, 2000). Barbour is a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, and was inaugurated into the Edmonton Cultural Hall of Fame in 2003.