“I Can Never Say Telemachus’s Name Right” by Alexa Thistle
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Northern Exposure” by Adèle Barclay.
I Can Never Say Telemachus’s Name Right
By Alexa Thistle
My father’s father has been missing for 43 years
I have to think about it when I read the Odyssey
Like Penelope, like Telemachus, we are still waiting
I am waiting for a man I never met
A native man on native land
Except well past 20 years, his home is still waiting
And as dawn, with her rose red fingers shone once more,
I picture him in an open field. A mountain range, maybe a meadow
A place where he gets a good view of dawn
And his bones become sunbleached
A bed of grass cradling his stay at hotel “Dead for Eternity.”
Or maybe he’s still alive
Still drug addled. Downtown East side
Thinking of his sons.
What happened to his Telemachus
Sedentary, watching the waves
Unrecognizable. Covered in rags
No where near the man who once had fist covered in flesh
And hand covered in hand
My grandfather exists to me as legend
Passed down through words and blood
Addiction. Love still there, clouded
Where are you, Odysseus?
Where are you lost?
Home is still here. Brampton is waiting for you
Wash up on the beach
Telemachus is still waiting, but even worse, he is wondering
His grief cradles him, but hope leads him on
He cannot commit fully to either dance and therefore cannot end the partnership
My father, with no answers, asks what I want to know
And still, I pour over the faces of missing John Does
As if I can make a miracle happen
As if I can be the one to bring him home
Copyright © Adèle Barclay
Forthcoming in Shame Engine from Nightwood (Spring 2027).
Adèle Barclay is the winner of the 2016 Lit POP Poetry Award, The Walrus’ 2016 Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry, The Fiddlehead’s 2022 Fiction Prize, The New Quarterly’s 2025 Creative Nonfiction Contest, and a 2025 National Magazine Award Gold. She is the author of the poetry collections, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, which won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Renaissance Normcore, and the forthcoming Shame Engine.
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