Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Letter from the Biologist’s Husband” by Mark Featherstone, part of the League’s Fresh Voices program.

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Letter from the Biologist’s Husband

By Mark Featherstone

When I was writing poems of sacred rivers

you walked on water – till the ice renounced

the weight of your belief in weightlessness

and doused your feet in the gravity of winter.

And when I wrote to claw myself from darkness

you scaled down sunlit walls round ancient cities,

clutching with your toes the faults and holes

where crumbling bricks had turned against their makers.

And when everything I wrote was only writing,

and your feet and soul were strong with winter climbing,

you smiled at me, and all my poems cracking

fell along the paths that led to you.

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Mark Featherstone is a retired biologist currently residing in California with his wife and youngest daughter. His poetry has appeared in Arc (2000) and the anthology Let Yourself Go (Black Moss Press, Hugh MacDonald, ed., 2005). He has published one chapbook, Mechanicsville (Over the Moon Press, 2004).

Fresh Voices is a publication and workshop program created by and for the League’s associate members.

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