Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Magpies” by Annick MacAskill.

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Magpies

By Annick MacAskill

Remarkable to our east coast eyes,

quotidian pest to the locals. You say beautiful

and spark derision, their eyebrows raised like pinkie fingers

and the corners of their mouths twitching.

Rarer still to us all these months later, as memory,

relegated to our respective crevices of Canada.

A pest, this distance, this longing. In memory,

the birds’ sleek feathers are still glossy in sunshine—

inky checkmarks against the whiteness of the sky,

the mountains—their wings and tails iridescent,

pulsing against the limits of spectrum,

rippling our vision into mirage.

You still say beautiful with conviction.

The world won’t know what to make of us either.

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Copyright © Annick MacAskill

From Murmurations (Gaspereau Press, 2020). Originally appeared in Poetry Pause on June 16, 2020.

Annick MacAskill’s poetry collections include Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award and the J.M. Abraham Award. Her fourth full-length collection will be published with Gaspereau Press in 2024. MacAskill lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.

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