“Natalia Zubkova (Black Snow)” by Bernard Wills
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Natalia Zubkova (Black Snow)” by Bernard Wills.
Natalia Zubkova (Black Snow)
By Bernard Wills
Sometimes courage is to name some thing
the garbage thing it is. Say this thing is soot,
with toxic fume that rises from some ring
of foundered mines that smolder under foot,
those mines the company will not clean up,
those mines for which the government โhas plansโ
child-stealing mines that kill, a bitter cup
of sludge youโre forced to drink from dented cans:
well, here this frazzled mother of three kids
with her tired, wrinkled million-meter stare,
her cigarette in hand, beneath those weary lids
a love like steel, the very thing to dare
to call death by its proper name, forbids
their lie to pass like reek across the conduits of air.
Copyright ยฉ Bernard Wills
Previously published credit.
Bernard Wills is a resident of Corner Brook Newfoundland and Canadian citizen. He is professor of Humanities at Grenfell Campus Memorial University. His published poems have appeared in Shot Glass Journal, Horseshoe, Event, Vallum, Nashwaak Review, The Maynard, Antigonish Review, Paper Mill Press, and Inkpot. He is also the winner of the Newfoundland and Labrador Provincial Arts and Letters prize for poetry for 2020. In 2024 he won a second Arts and Letters prize for a poem entitled โPicturesโ.
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