Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. This June, Poetry Pause celebrates Indigenous and LGBTQI2S+ poets for Indigenous History Month and Pride Month! Read “Blue Shirt” by Keith Garebian.

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Blue Shirt

By Keith Garebian

Your wife’s eloquent taste

in a shirt I can touch

without her permission.

Shows her longing, a history—

life in another world

useless to me. Her command

of colour rippling across your chest,

singing allure.

Where her hand rested, pale fingers

you loved before mine.

Was it gift or dark warning,

forget-me-not or binding?

Are you Odysseus or Orpheus

in our domestic myth—

husband and father who returns home

or lover who loses all in looking back?

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Copyright © Keith Garebian

Keith Garebian has been widely praised for his poetry collections Frida: Paint Me as a Volcano; Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems; Children of Ararat; Poetry is Blood; Against Forgetting; In the Bowl of My Eye; Finger to Finger; and his chapbook Scan: Cancer Poems (Frog Hollow). One of his poems from Blue was adapted to music for choir and instruments by celebrated American composer Gregory Spears and has been released on Cd (“The Tower and the Garden”) by Navona Records. Another poem from the same collection was adapted to modern dance by Voices Dance Project, Ottawa, in October 2023. In 2024 a poem from Poetry is Blood was adapted for music and vocals by Juliet Palmer. His awards include a Canada Council Senior Grant for Writing; over three dozen Ontario Arts Council grants; four Mississauga Arts Council Grants for Established Writing; the Naji Naaman Literary Honour Prize (Lebanon); the Surrey International Writers Conference, Poetry Award; the Ellen S. Jaffe Humanist Poetry Award; and the William Saroyan Medal he received in Yerevan in 2013 for his writing about Armenian culture and genocide. Garebian’s latest poetry collection is Three-Way Renegade about Samuel Steward, gay American icon.

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