Donia G. Mounsef, Lebanon-Canada
Black-Eyed Susans at Skerryvore I
“Despair is the damp of hell”
—John Donne
An apocalyptic forecast, a date
rhymed on invisible calendars,
a damp hell, where a hotel burnt
in suspicious circumstances at Skerryvore.
From the Gaelic, An Sgeir Mhòr,
a “great rock.” Skerry, from the old Norse,
sker, a small island unfit for habitation.
From Scotland’s remote reefs, to Ojibway Sands,
people buy reams of sedimentary rock
like bunched carrots at the market.
They think they purchase the history
and the silence
of the people along with it.
Islands taken from the Shawanaga
First Nation, handed over without
a shadow of a doubt to settlers
who roam on homesteads, steady
homes, oblivious of colonial
dispossession, succession,
a crime. I poured another tequila
lime, ran an extra lap, counted crabs
in a stolen trap, on tidal shoals.
Despair slowly removes a bolt
in the handrails of time, portents
future horror, loosens the crutch,
keeping us upright in our inner
storm, turns reverie into harpoons,
stabs the quotidian, scalds eyes with
silky rays of an ashen midnight sun,
borrowed from their ancestors.
Black-Eyed Susans at Skerryvore II
The burden of contested lands never
sleeps. What are we doing here? Whose
waterway are we gleefully drifting on?
Gathering the edge of a summer solstice
in the turn of our paddle blades,
the everglades of rootless cull, coarsened
strokes of a past we could never belong to.
There are no palm prints on this wet rock
that sweats to the rhythm of the Anishnaabe
language—Navanno-nibiimaang Gichigamiin
(Great Lakes—the Five Freshwater Seas)—
a knot loops and frays in the viral archive
of rocks woven with Northern Lights, defaced
laramide, dispossessed vessels, wedged
in frozen, pristine, untouched ice-lakes.
A ghost ship of people who were here
first, whose phantoms moan sonic
textures on soft tundra, spitting warm
summer blooms of wild black-eyed Susans,
spreading nectar on forgotten limestone.
Frenzied Whalebone
Does this shore know me, remember my feet
stomping in elation or trepidation, against
crystal scorch? Does it know the roll and
crest of seafoam, the murmur of rusted hulls
awaiting a miracle with ghosts of fishermen
sitting on broken deck chairs with bowed fishing
rods, corroded hooks on the pelagic floor?
If you tell the liquid form all your grief, will it
turn it into scintillating stars, shooting over
reticent seaboards, frenzied whalebone-shaped,
cutting tidelines into veins of light, shattered
pearls, briny seaweed, broken mastheads,
obnubilate seashells where you never know
if what’s inside was dead or alive?
Donia G. Mounsef grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. She is a Canadian-Lebanese poet, playwright and dramaturge. She splits her time on either side of the Canadian Shield, between Toronto and Edmonton where she teaches theatre and poetry at the University of Alberta. She is the author of a poetry collection: Plimsoll Lines (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2018), and a chapbook: Slant of Arils, (Damaged Goods Press, 2015), reviewed in Fruita Pulp. Her writing has been published and anthologized in online and in print in Mortar Magazine, Cordite, Pacific Review, The Harpoon Review, The Toronto Quarterly, Poetry Quarterly and elsewhere. Her performance poetry and plays have been performed on stage in Toronto, Avignon, Montréal, Calgary, Vancouver, and Edmonton.
