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Duplex: Parched by Wendy Donawa

By League of Canadian Poets | January 17, 2023

Poem title: Duplex: Parched Poet name: Wendy Donawa Poem: The opposite of love’s not hate, it’s just indifference. Drought has shocked the salvia into indigo flares. Drought’s made the difference, riots of cobalt across the parched field. The heart’s parched, a dry field rioting blues that passersby evade, as though no harm transpires from their evasive passage, ignoring entropy, that random chaos. Ignore entropy, seed chaos, the unseen life where ardour fades to ennui in beds, towns, nations. Life fades, arduous. Oppression flourishes in these parched fields. Oh let them green, let flourish. Let blue beauty flourish, oppose indifference, love’s unjust opposite. End of poem. Note: The duplex form, with its ghazal-like leaps, is an invention of Jericho Brown: -14 lines (like a sonnet), -Seven couplets. The 2nd line of each couplet echoes in the 1st line of the next. -The 1st and last lines of the poem are repeated (like a pantoum). Credits and bio: Copyright © Wendy Donawa Wendy Donawa spent much of her adult life in Barbados, where she was educated, raised her family, and enjoyed her work as a college instructor and museum curator. She has returned to her Victoria birthplace on the unceded traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt people. Her poems have appeared in magazines, chapbooks, anthologies, and public transport buses; she has read in libraries, bookstores, literary festivals, reading series, parks, and pubs! Her first book, Thin Air of the Knowable, was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and a Gerald Lampert Award finalist. Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions, her second poetry collection, appeared as one of the Frontenac Quartet (Frontenac House) in 2021.

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