Concerning our Glorious Future by Stan Burfield
As I lift the spoon
from this morning’s coffee
I feel the same long pull of time
that my father did
my mother
that their parents did
and theirs
a chain rattling down
into the well so far
I cannot imagine.
And up, out of that darkness
into this present,
all of it –
the slow ages of our reptilian forebears,
our fearful hominid ancestors,
the entire charging ascent of Man –
comes to a juddering halt
at this drop
of coffee
falling
from this spoon.
We are stranded here
immovable
at the endpoint
of time, banging
our heads
on the ceiling.
When I wrote the first draft of this poem Linda and I owned a flower shop in Vancouver. One of my jobs was to buy flowers at the auction. I would have to get up at about 4:30 those mornings. For a night owl like me that meant a lot of coffee. I would arrive at 5:30, do a walking tour of many of the wagons of flowers to decide which ones to buy a bucket from, then get a cup of coffee and take my seat in the buyer`s gallery. My desk, shared with another buyer, was near the top. I would look down onto the heads of the roughly 150 other buyers who sat there in a large arc, at the centre of which the wagons of flowers would enter, pause till all their buckets had been purchased and then exit. On this morning, I sat slouched with my coffee, my mind half asleep floating in the usual cloud of blended voices, my chin resting on my hand. About half of the people around me were of Asian origin, owners of corner stores all of which had large flower displays out on the sidewalk. I began to notice them, to slowly think about them and their stores, and imagined a lot of them were sitting in the same desks their fathers sat in before them. And maybe their father`s fathers even earlier. And yet the present moment was all that existed there in that large sleepy hubbub. And now that past. And its past. I started to wake up. I plucked my pen out of my pocket. A poem was coming on.
The 1st place winner of the Poetry London 2014 Poetry Contest was Michael Kuiack for his poem Life is School