One hand

Shackles are broken.
Walls have fallen.
Doors have opened;
It took one hand.

One black hand
reached out to other hands
of every age and colour;
held them in his own.

One frigid winter day,
hope hanging in the air;
One black hand
pledged an oath,
laid one brick;
laid the new path.

But one hand
cannot break apart
ten thousand shackles,
rebuild two towers,
hold the weight
of the world.

Not one hand.
Not one man.

“What Really Matters” — Review of Where the Butterflies Go

I just realized I’ve never posted a review of my poetry collection here on my blog.

It’s been almost a year since its release, and thanks to your kind interest, I’m very close to being able to make a third donation to third-world educational projects. What a thrill to have exceeded my goal like this.  Once a few more books are sold, I will donate to Unicef’s Gift of Education fund for the second time. So please consider the book as a possible Valentine’s or Mother’s Day gift, and tell your love or your Mom that half the proceeds  go to helping a child get an education they otherwise may never receive. I am happy to ship autographed copies if you contact me, just drop me a comment here so I know you’re interested.

UK poet Tom Phillips kindly took some time to review my collection when it was first launched. I would like to once again thank Tom, Tony Lewis-Jones, Kathryn McL. Collins, Sally Evans and everyone else who has dropped by and reviewed my book on the Lulu web site for taking the time to make such thoughtful critiques. What a year it’s been!

Where the Butterflies Go by Heather Grace Stewart
http://www.lulu.com/content/1506907

* * * * * * 6/6 stars

by Tom Phillips
Arranged under three broad headings – ‘Pain’, ‘Growth’, ‘Family’ – Heather Grace Stewart’s Where The Butterflies Go gets at the nub of what it means to try and live in a world which appears to be passing by at an ever more astonishing speed and where what’s pumped out through TV and computer screens seems startlingly at odds with both the realities of ordinary, day-to-day existence and our more humane impulses and aspirations. It is a book of illusion, disillusion and, as it were, re-illusion, an acknowledgment of loss and the discovery of fragile compensations. The great risk for poetry like this, of course, is that it can come across as rather naïve, the losses too easily overcome, the compensations too easily found. That’s certainly not the case here. Thanks to an exhilarating directness and a worked-for simplicity of language, not to mention a nicely self-deprecating sense of humour on occasion, this is a book full of sharply drawn images, honest poignancy and frank admissions.
Take ‘Golden Dreams’, with its refrain of ‘Durango gold, Durango gold’ alluding to the Colorado gold rush and, by implication, the consumerist dream. Here, on a home-improvements shopping trip, Grace Stewart is overwhelmed by a different sort of ‘rush’, one of harsher realities: “We choose ceramic tiles/content,/while war rages/over the ocean,” she writes, with a telling nod at childhood song (“My bonny lies over the ocean”, too), before admitting, with an almost brutal honesty: “We care, but still go about our lives.” Only, of course, she’s not letting herself off that lightly – there’s homelessness, a government dedicated to preserving the status quo… By the end all that’s left, it seems, are “dark clouds/across this Canadian sky”.
The causes of such disillusion seem legion. There are poems here about the 1989 Montreal massacre (when fourteen women were gunned down at the Ecole Polytechnique), child-soldiers in Sierra Leone, disenfranchised women in Iraq, 9/11, beggars, poverty, domestic violence, divorcing couples, and a child mown down by a speeding driver. In the ‘Pain’ section of the book in particular, it seems a bleak, broken and violent world where the only option appears to be to “forget about/the fragile parts/and go on surviving”.
Grace Stewart, though, doesn’t forget those “fragile parts” – love, empathy, hope – and refinding them occupies the remainder of the book. In many ways, this is about celebrating simple, mostly domestic pleasures – the sight of bulbs in the garden coming into flower, the “butterfly kisses” of an unborn child in the womb, that child’s first steps, an embrace, “the shelter of my lover’s arms”, “the melting days” at the end of winter – but always with a persistent sense of their fragility and a refreshing down-to-earthness which locates these moments in the context of dirty washing, internet pop-ups, torn umbrellas and other irritations which “just won’t matter/100 years from now”.
In ‘My love picks me plums’, for instance, she accepts “bushels and bushels of dark juicy fruit” from her husband on her first anniversary, only to remember to “file this moment away in my mind/for some day when, in heated argument/I wish to throw plums at him”, while in ‘Forecast’, the hope she finds “hanging in the air” after a storm is simultaneously “just within my reach;/just outside our window”. Such ambiguity gives these poems their strength because ultimately these are restorative acts, finding and preserving moments of tantalising hope, sifting what really matters from what doesn’t and holding on. (Tom Phillips)

A Few Poems About Facebook

Five Thousand Friends

Just six clicks away
from five thousand “friends.”

No clue what today is,
or what’s on CNN.

I should really get dressed,
Or at least shave my pits.
But with all these new friends,
I can’t stop the clicks.

Glued to the screen
like some kind of affliction.
Welcome to Facebook:
the world’s
latest addiction.

Lolita

Her name is Lolita.
She’s got Double D’s.
She’s bold and she’s beautiful;
She’s eager to please.

She’s got five hundred friends;
She’s charming and wise.
They flock to her photos;
She’s so easy on the eyes.

Oh so lovely, dark, mysterious.
But that’s not just a fake tan.
That’s one fake old photograph.
That’s one smart old man.

Social networking

I’d grow wiser if I watched
webcasts of the Dalai Lama.
But, no way I’m leaving Twitter:
I’m being followed by Obama.

What am I doing?
Do you really care to know?
I’m eating lemon pie
And dancing to “Jai, Ho!”

How’d you stumble upon me?
All these passwords; I’m confused.
They own all my content?
We’re the Users and the used.

Now, I won’t be a hypocrite;
I Tweet my time away,
change my status often;
check my blog stats every day.

But if people gave a dollar
for every single Tweet,
homes could be built
and cancer could be beat.

I like to be connected.
I’m not saying that it’s wrong.
But how’d we switch from
talking to texting all day long?

No, I don’t need to know
who your peeps are porkin’
but, no way I’m leaving Facebook:
I’m friends with Aaron Sorkin.

All poems copyright Heather Grace Stewart, 2009.