Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “the burning of the dead” by Josephine LoRe, part of the League’s Fresh Voices program.

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the burning of the dead

By Josephine LoRe

I never made a fire for you. I lit a candle, yes

but not a torch, a conflagration. a soundless

howl against incessant night. I could not

burn your things: the lists you wrote

the clothes you wore that held the secret

of your scent.instead I tied these all

together with the roughened rope

of memory.made a raft. and some nights

float out onto the sea of endless stars. listen

for the way you play guitar, strains soft and sad

your voice pure and light, an offering

to gods. why then do I wake to ash

adhering the lashes of my eye, ashes

in the side-part of my hair, the grit of ash

at back of tangled throat?

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Copyright © Josephine LoRe

a pearl in this diamond world … Josephine LoRe has shared her poetry live and in global zoom-rooms. Her words have been put to music, danced, interpreted in ASL, and integrated into visual art. She has two collections, Unity and the Calgary Herald Bestseller The Cowichan Series, and has been published in literary magazines and anthologies in fifteen countries and five languages. “The Tea Set” was shortlisted for the Room Poetry Prize, and “Enough” was selected for use in a Public Service Announcement for Feed the Children. She respectfully acknowledges that she lives and creates on the ancestral and traditional lands of the Piikani, Siksika, Kainai, Tsuut’ina and Nakota peoples.

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

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