Blake Leitch Poems

Battlegrounds

A flash of gold and red and grey,
a deafening chorus of heartbeats,
a moment the present solely exists;
this is the anthem of war.

My right hand has been grasping
for months at smoke,
vapour caressing my fingers
while sliding through hopes.
My ghosts lie not behind me,
but in my very mind,
inside my breaking heart.

Another shard of glass
fits neatly into this endless puzzle;
a broken vase that was never made
for the purpose of gluing back together.

My Cumorah

I dream for the silent places of truth,
the places of Wulf Young or Joseph Smith.
I miss Young’s sea breeze that bites at the tooth;
for trees that quiet the world, I wish.
I hope for voices to ebb away
and the motors o’erhead to leave this place.
I desire to keep the world at bay,
but without such truth, I have this space.
I have this rickety back patio
with a rusted brazier for a centrepiece,
the sight of industrious workers below
and a constant suburbia with its own special peace.
The noise never ends, never lulls on this hill,
but something here lies that holds my heart still.

Shadows

It is at my side,
always,
the place the light doesn’t reach,
at least for now.
It is dark
and simple
and unremovable;
not the plaything of Peter Pan,
but the worst of times.
It is not sewn on to be hewn off,
it is an intrinsic part of the whole.
Sometimes it is silent
and small,
a cirrus cloud on a summer’s day.
Sometimes not,
sometimes that towering cumulonimbus
that silences the sun’s rays.
It is at my side,
always,
always.
It is at my side tonight.

Spring 2016 et al.

I’ve written this poem before,
written of the newness of new sun
and the enlivening words of the dead.
Chaos is what I once thought,
once believed,
but everything returns to where it begins,
finds home where it belongs.
I’ve written this poem before
and so have a dozen dozen others,
those enlivening words of the dead.

‘Dark grey clouds’

Dark grey clouds
without silver line
wander across
a southern sky.
They bring the rain
in spotted ways,
they bring a darkness
to today.
And yet, for a moment
amidst the clouds,
the sky breaks through
that hopeless shroud;
just a glimpse
of hopeful blue,
enough to bring
a hopeful hue.

The Storm for the Rain

I didn’t see one, two,
three or four,
didn’t see anything
less than all.

No different shapes,
no different hues,
no different sizes;
just a sheet, grey-blue.

I opened my hand
to hold just one,
but so many fell
and my grasp, undone.

One will never fall
by oneself,
but together, together
comes falling down.

Hands

I wished, still wish, to travel the world.
I wish to see Russia and Pakistan,
southern Africa and the US east coast,
France, Belgium, and
Te Anau just one more time.
I wish to see the golden jellyfish of Palau,
or the Aurora Borealis in frozen Alaska.
I wish for the world, I wish for the world…

On this Sunday, enduring to the end
is just a little too much.
Enduring to the end with joy in heart,
it’s enough to make a grown man cry.

On a ferry ride from Victoria to Port Angeles,
when phobia marred a fidgeting finger
and made flesh raw,
when sense and reason had no place,
a hand was offered
and it stayed
until chaos went its way.