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Milton Acorn

Canada's People's Poet

(Governor General Award for poetry)

 

Rhodes Ave Scholars

by Chris Faiers

 

Even though you repeat yourself thinking your mumbles

are more important than the truths of beginning poets.

 

Even though you never acknowledge I wrote poetry,

you old fart, I am still a student of the Milton Acorn School of Poetry.

 

Even if you are too goddam proud too officially open it, so the only way

I could join was to declare it officially open it in this poem.

 

So here it is uncle Milty & even though I said a nasty thing or two in this dedication, More Poems for People is still the only book I read often enough to hide my money in…

 

I forget (laughing)

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Links ~

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Milton Acorn Wikipedia

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Excerpt from Marmora Historical Foundation

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Chris Faiers - Poet   zenriver@sympatico.ca        

                  

Official Website

ART CREDIT_ P. JOHN BURDEN Canada's Peoples Poet MILTON ACORN PEI Canada.jpg

 

I've Tasted My Blood

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Milton Acorn

 

If this brain’s over-tempered

consider that the fire was want

and the hammers were fists.

I’ve tasted my blood too much

to love what I was born to.

 

But my mother’s look

was a field of brown oats, soft-bearded;

her voice rain and air rich with lilacs:

and I loved her too much to like

how she dragged her days like a sled over gravel.

 

Playmates? I remember where their skulls roll!

One died hungry, gnawing grey perch-planks;

one fell, and landed so hard he splashed;

and many and many

come up atom by atom

in the worm-casts of Europe.

 

My deep prayer a curse.

My deep prayer the promise that this won’t be.

My deep prayer my cunning,

my love, my anger,

and often even my forgiveness

that this won’t be and be.

I’ve tasted my blood too much 

to abide what I was born to.

 

 

Milton Acorn, “I’ve Tasted My Blood” from I’ve Tasted My Blood. Copyright © 1969 by Milton Acorn. Reprinted by permission of Mary Hooper, literary executor of the Estate of Milton Acorn & Mosaic Press. 

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Source: The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (Oxford University Press, 1983)

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