Geomantic riposte: 'Grid'

Brenda Schmidt is a writer, visual artist, naturalist and active blogger based in Creighton, a mining town on the Canadian Shield in northern Saskatchewan, and she has lived in northern Saskatchewan for twenty-six years. Schmidt was a finalist for the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry in 2001, is the winner of the Alfred G. Bailey Prize for Poetry in 2003 and a finalist for the CBC Literary Award for poetry on four occasions. In her fourth collection Grid, Schmidt’s wry humour transcends what we have watched heap up in Canada for more than a century—nature poems—balancing in canola fields between the beautiful lure of nature and our curious urge to separate ourselves from disappearing allotments of our own solace. We have wandered “off the grid” but fortunately Schmidt is an entertaining and insightful guide who can still find Li Po in a Dark-eyed Junco, if she has to.

Grid by Brenda Schmidt (Hagios Press, 2012, Page 65)

A hundred dollars will buy you

a hot stone massage

at a spa in Regina. Fine.

Out here, with farming

the way it is,

if you want to align and balance

your energy centres,

your best bet’s to lie

down in July on the gravel

at 3 in the afternoon,

let the flies and ants

walk all over you.

Geomantic Riposte: Fancypants

Where I’m from Regina is not quite as fancypants but the fish

are gone so like enduring friendship it’s been glacial to move

and establish new territory via ‘sensuous genius’    So potting

soil’s from Lowe’s and our new polymer fives that can’t stand

the heat are chancy at the self-checkout      or at least the girl

didn’t know but our little trees should thrive as that window

gets a ton of prairie sun       I’m used to the gloom that made

the Natives and Captain Vancouver’s crew feel they were in

a Joseph Conrad novel      Yeah where I’m from we’re above

it all we just charge up our cars and drive to Goldcorp Centre

through mounds of sulphur to chat about mining         Klaatu

barada nikto    excuse me that’s just Gort reminding me that

where I’m from we’d like this planet to stop what it’s doing