Kelvin Thomas Johnson
Birthdate: March 14, 1931
Place: Barnwell, Alberta
This introduction has been crafted by his wife, but the poetry below belongs to Kelvin alone.
Now fifty once young years have gone
The yeasted sky is bland and wan,
And lowering heaven leans upon
The golden shoulders of the dawn.
You would deny it if I said,
When you were young the world was dead,
Or claimed you must somewhere have read
That freedom is a woman's head.
You may be right, and yet your life,
Though full of tenderness, was rife
With telling words that set a knife
Between the male ribs of strife.
Perhaps your easy dreaming dad
Released your mind. You'd have been sad
Sealed to some patriarchal lad
Whose bridle only made you mad.
You would have seen no college light
To lift your mind above the night
Of poverty and local slight,
And fire your will to set things right.
But even if his kind neglect
Inspired his children to perfect
Their native genious and reject
A blindness they could not correct,
It must have been your mother's steel
That set the tone and tuned the feel
Of woman's power to shape and seal
A destiny beyond wing and wheel.
Though eighty-two, I've still the heart
To tell you this before we part:
Some friends have thought that from the start
You were the horse and I the cart.
But all such silliness has fled,
And this great truth I'll say instead:
Wide yellow mustard fields are spread
And dance beneath a thoroughbred.
A father is a primal paradox, a dream,
A fading and a crescent recollection,
Pale justicer of some forgotten moonlit space,
And yet, a point, particular in time and place,
A cautious and a comforting connection.
And what of you, my first-born daughter--
So finely tuned and excellently fashioned
Moonlit image of your mother in the water?
Since the day you rode the morning into life
You have washed her golden east with grandeur.
And I have loved you, and I love you lovely daughter
For how often you have sent me off to school
When I've counselled against losses long since lost,
And riding on the fallen crest of angry wash
I've dashed among those rocks of unaccounted cost.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Yet here we stand
Feet firmly fixed upon grand father's land.
And there are things that I would tell you
Had I power to plant and nourish thought.
But I too, like my father scattering seeds
Upon this shifting prairie sand,
I fear the wind.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The cottonwood is gone.
That father planted here
To halt the wind and stop its robbing,
And the fields are wild
With warrior weeds;
But there's a motion in the mind
That finds a farm boy
Bearing scraps of father's farmyard--
Boards and nails and wire--
From limb to limb to birdlike housing.
Pressed in natural communion,
Face and arms against new bark,
Head full of wind turned leaves
And scent of their unfolding,
He sways in childhood's rhythm.
There's a longing in his limbs
To lay upon the earth
In timeless tranquil union.
She's a mother;
There's no quarrel for possession.
In the depths of her cool mystery
Caves discover the rooted cottonwood
High in whose arms the west is widened,
And the graveyard and the red ants disappear
And the pain of Marvin's passing.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It seems so strange a boy should fall
From cotton wood and innocence to harm
And break upon the earth his climbing arm
The year his heart dicovers love and all.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Some where I learned the game of chess:
I found it everywhere, its order, and I guess
The war was in my bones before I knew it.
The king was of my mind, a thing of order,
(Written by Kelvin Johnson for Mary who had read the National Geographic January 1991 description of the people of Surma)
We cut the tall, wild grass today:
It needed trimming. And too, the hedge,
Its limbs, thrust out where people walk,
Slapped at our faces for attention.
However, let the truth be told:
They may have been a bit defiant.
But something in the mind loves symmetry,
And to the mind, these were an alien rupture.
Lawns too are of the mind,
and though a hedge needs trimming,
Limbs are not like grass. When trimmed,
My hedge, a strange up-ended potting,
is grieved, it seems, to grace man's walk,
Wanting to prevent it. The lawn, however,
Every paper boy can vouch, Is trimmed
For view, not to make trespas sweeter.
Had I not cut the lilac volunteers
grown in somehow among catony asters,
I'd not have grieved myself today
as I am doing, would not have seen
what last year's trimming did.
Where I had trimmed those leaves
mid-summer last, hedge-life was gone.
It's death masked by the lilac filling in.
And I was shocked. My young son
at my insistence, working by my side
was mildly interested; but I have grieved
about it since, and wondered.
Grass often clipped is good to look at.
Hedges must be clipped at certain times.
To cut leaves in the pride of summer-growing
cuts life's pulse to fruition flowing .
Uninterupted sap returns to root in autumn
and the dying branches lose their leaves.
Limbs rampant grown can then be trimmed
and spring renew them. There's a rythm
that is natural to growing, there's a time
to teach and trim, to nurture knowing.
Let the summer face of symetry be softenned:
Let life withdraw to root the pride of growing.