Past Tree Appearances
In Print
Videos of Sean Moreland
Sean Moreland
Sean Moreland has spent the last year vacillating between Kingston and Ottawa, Ontario. As of August 2009, he'll be living in North Bay, teaching at Nipissing University and communing with the black bears. His poetry has appeared in venues including bywords.ca, The Ottawa Arts Review, The Malahat Review, NoD Magazine, Variations and The Peter F. Yacht Club. His chapbook, Lupercalia , is available from the Bywords Press,and Dalhousie Blues , a collaborative book with Christine McNair, Caleb Brassett and Jamie Bradley is available from Ex Hubris Press. He won the John Newlove award in 2007. In his other hand, he gingerly holds a PhD in English from the University of Ottawa, as if it might suddenly sting him.
From Sean Moreland
en Font
Our first prayers are probably languageless
Gurgles, instinctive hymns that tangle
immature limbs in the glottal-cut keenings
and kenning-coo songs of our little pink
shells: when we scream, you can hear the sea
or see the raw thirst flower in the whorl
of a wordless mouth
Mar{riage
dawn drags the street
seeking us
muffled bodies
hid in the bush
of the bedclothes
behind the blind slats
camouflage of half
consciousness
a sleepy coruscation
& our still-moist edges
web together
as eyelids, glued
under sleep still
our only common space:
when the light
and the radio rages
the day awake, when we rise
it is as two stems rooted
each in separate solitudes
erect as pine
as poised
as asps, ASAP
to strike, snap
asphalt-rough
if touched, even by accident.
Morning guerrillas, at war with the day
for with the day we are
at war with one another.
