Friday Night

It is Good Friday, the fog has been in and out of the harbour all day and now is in again, gentle fog that drapes itself over McNab’s and slides up the Arm. It was a quiet day where you could do things outside and where you could hear the ship’s long foghorn blast with its echo that kept on going for ten seconds or more. It has been a good Friday.

Today’s poem for National Poetry Month is one of mine. I wrote it on a Friday after school and after reading from Creeley’s great collection, For Love. The poem speaks of the quiet of a Friday night after work waiting for Lorraine to come home from art school, and the voice it speaks in has some of the flavour and rhythm of Mr. Creeley, whose words had inspired me to write and whose cadences were still in my ear.


Friday Night

inside this
house, this place
she has made

of pale walls, white
ceilings, light
coming from over there

or here, behind me,
warm silence, this
gentle air

a space
she has created,
speaks of her,

where I wait,
surrounded
by quiet,

to hear
her say
my name

(Published in SKAZ, No. 1, January 1992)