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)
Links ~
Excerpt from Marmora Historical Foundation
Chris Faiers - Poet zenriver@sympatico.ca
I've Tasted My Blood
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.
Source: The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (Oxford University Press, 1983)
