When Freedom Stands

Babies are born and lovers lie;
We’ll make plans, when Freedom stands.
Do not let their stories die.

We teach the how, perhaps the why;
Teach to repeat, to ace exams;
Heart and truth would make them cry.

He stayed inside, in search of his brother.
The second plane hit, lens on his mother.

They put on their fire suits, knowing the worst.
They stormed the pilot; called home first.

Some got relief. Some got the wall.
Nine-thousand remains: nothing at all.

Heartbeats skip and minutes fly
like spy planes with capture plans.
And the dead cannot ask why.

It’s not the oil. Truly, we’ll try.
Allied lands, joining hands—
Empty space in our New York sky.

Babies are born and lovers cry;
We’ll make plans, when Freedom stands.
Do not let their stories lie.
Do not let their stories die.

The Twin Towers, by Heather Grace Stewart (2000)

Valley

for Larry and Robin

Your pillow has a valley;
that soft place
where your head would rest.

This first night without you,
I’m lost in the valley.
I never want to climb out.

I breathe in your scent,
memorize every note;
pretend you’re still beside me.
My delusions are quickly
interrupted by an incessant
buzzing:  I’ve left my
cell phone on vibrate.

The minutiae of life
must go on; I must go on.
Somehow, I’ll make up
your side of bed.
Someday, your pillow
will lose its soft scent;
your clothes will be gone;
all traces of you
will have faded from view.

But you were my valley;
you were that soft place
where my head would rest;

Love like that
is a flower
that never fades.

April Snow

The evening news
left us sleepless
with images of protests
in the holy city, terrorist
bombings, drive-by shootings
in our own town.

Yet on Easter morning
we awoke to snow sheets on
a wishing-well roof,
unexpected purple buds
bursting through the frost,
a silver steeple glistening
against the cerulean sky,

and our little girl toddling outside
to find golden eggs in the snow;
barefoot on icing-sugar-steps,
laughing and dancing
with her sister-cousins.

Driving west at sunset,
morning snow a memory,
the returning geese
called out to us
like old friends,
leading us home.

Closer

There are no ordinary days.
Yes, coffee so often gets cold
before you drink it,
work gets trite and tedious,
traffic jams in the same place every day,
love and family fall into routine—

But look a little closer
in that rear view mirror:
There, in that car behind you.
That young girl, her face aglow;
She’s on her way to the hospital
waiting to get her cochlear implants—
waiting to hear birds sing,
a running stream,
her mother’s voice.

Or there,
in that long lineup at the grocery store.
See that woman in the tattered grey coat?
She’ll only be able to buy the milk.
Everything else will be put back
and she will walk out in shame;
her three hungry children
tagging along behind her.

Look there, at that big, beautiful home
with the blue shutters.
He’s just left her and their children.
Moved away; told her in a text message.
She’s feigning an “Everything’s Great” grin
for acquaintances on the street,
but inside, she’s broken.
How can he erase them
so easily, without emotion?
Erased like chalk-drawn hearts,
not the tiny, beating hearts
they once lulled to sleep.

Look again.
Objects in that mirror
are closer than they appear.

There are no ordinary days.
Not for you, not for me,
not for our angels.

'The Empty Bowl', taken on an "ordinary" day in Paris. HG Stewart.

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.

All I Want for Christmas…

The greatest lesson I learned this year was that I don’t need great power or money to make a difference in the world. I can use my talents to help others. I got a much greater reward than any award or sum of money simply by learning how children in the third world have benefited from the donations I’ve been able to offer Unicef and Grace Educational Trust School.

Thanks to your interest in my poetry collection, I’ve surpassed my goal of being able to give a child in the third world the Gift of Education for a year. In addition to that Gift, I recently donated money from the proceeds of my book sales to buy bed nets to help children avoid malaria, and just bought a child the Gift of Play. A lot of children have never seen art supplies or a jump rope. Shouldn’t every child in this world know what it is to create and to play?

Earlier this year, thanks to an interview I did with Neelima Pratap for one of my magazine articles, I discovered a wonderful school in Goa, India that is in its beginning stages and needs financial help so the children can have supplies, desks (they currently sit on the soil to study) and a larger room to serve as their classroom. After I donated to Unicef,  I was able to donate proceeds from WTBG to Grace Educational Trust School to help them out a bit with the construction costs for the chairs and desks. I hope with Christmas sales and throughout 2009 I can continue to donate to both Unicef and Grace Educational Trust School.

I am still committed to donating half the proceeds from sales of Where the Butterflies Go to third world educational projects, even though I initially said I’d just try to fund one child’s education for a year. I didn’t want to stop at that once I realized how many lives could be touched with the small donation each book sale offers. I want to keep going, and I hope you’ll help me by buying the book for Christmas gifts this year; Mother’s Day gifts next year, or just for yourself. That’s all I want for Christmas!

People of all ages and backgrounds enjoy my poems – there really is something in this collection for everyone, so it makes a great gift for that person who seems to have everything. You can read the reviews here: Reviews of Heather’s poetry collection. This is also the spot where I’d prefer you buy the book, as Amazon takes a heftier royalty, leaving less for me to donate to Unicef. Just a request

Autographed copies are available by emailing me at writer@hgrace.com. I can ship the signed book to you once I receive payment via Paypal. Unsigned copies are easily bought via lulu.com as well as amazon sites internationally.

It’s been such a joy to receive notices from Grace School updating me on the school’s progress. Recently, the school’s small staff organized a Children’s Day at the school. The children had never seen party hats or favours before, and were so excited to receive the simplest things most of us take for granted, like pencils and erasers.

Pencils and erasers. I’ve learned through my involvement with Unicef and Grace Educational Trust School this year that the simplest, most seemingly insignificant gifts can give children in third world countries a sense of well-being, self-worth and pride. Those are the gifts I can’t wait to give this Christmas.

Children's Day at GET: Their faces say it all!

Order unsigned copies of my book here and receive them in time for Christmas: Where the Butterflies Go

Signed copies ordered through me before Dec. 15 should also make it in time for the 25th!

Learn more about Grace Educational Trust School through a CBC special here  Giving Hope).

Gifts of Magic are a great stocking stuffer idea – see more about Unicef’s Gifts of Magic here).

A Child’s View of Politics

On this historic day, I feel privileged to be able to write that my neighbours in the United States of America have elected an ambitious, wise, and inspiring leader who also happens to be black.

Let’s be real now: Barack Obama can’t and won’t do it all. He’s only one man, and this is politics, where it seems like everything is debated and nothing gets done. But this great leader has sparked in us – in so many different people around the world – a sense of hope and joy and promise. This morning, there is a light that I have not seen behind people’s eyes since the fall of the Berlin wall. A light that went out with the fall of two towers. That’s something already, and he’s not even in office yet.

He’s even inspired our three-and-a-half-year-old  daughter. I told her yesterday, while we watched some election coverage on TV and the Net, that Obama was a great man who wanted to help people who don’t have as much as we have; that he wanted everyone to have access to homes and food and jobs and happiness. I said he was going to try to teach people to share and make the world a better place. That was the best explanation I could give a toddler in the early morning before my first coffee.

I educated her in the same way with the October Canadian election, and after listening intently to the choices she had; after Mommy pushing Green perhaps just a little too hard, she said she wanted to vote “Purple.” This time, she seemed to be mulling over everything I’d said more, and really taking it in.

Over supper, before the election results were in, she told Daddy about her day. Out of the blue, she looked at him and said, “Daddy, Obama’s going to change the world!” with a big grin on her face.

This morning, I set up our daughter with breakfast in front of the TV, and together we watched Obama’s historic speech, thanks to a wonderful technology called PVR. “He won? You mean he’s already won?”  she said to me during the speech, not realizing that she’d actually missed this “defining moment,” as Obama put it,  while asleep in her bed.

“Yes, honey, Barack Obama is President. It’s like you said last night, he’s going to try to change the world!” I said.

She looked at me, perplexed. “But Mommy, I don’t want him to change the world!” she began to cry.

My heart skipped a beat. I wondered what could be coming next. Was she seeing his colour? Had someone put ideas in her head? I paused the speech. I would have to talk with her. Then she finished her thought:

“I don’t want him to change it. I like it round!”

Autumn Will

The great oak sways proud, stands high,
Then paints its final will against an autumn sky:
That is how I wish to live, and how I wish to die.

Its branches like a lover’s arms; its shadows where the lonely lie,
Where the old find shelter and the young learn to fly—
The great old oak sways proud, stands high.

Embracing change from day to nigh,
It bows to hold the children; uplifts all passers by—
That is how I wish to live, and how I wish to die.

Its last leaf falls with bright flamboyance,
A crimson battle cry! — and still
The great old oak sways proud, stands high.

Its branches have broken, its roots run dry,
Reduced to a stump, it asks not why—
Just comforts each friend that
comes there to cry.

That is how I wish to love, and how I wish to die.

copyright Heather Grace Stewart, from her poetry collection Where the Butterflies Go (2008)

"Autumn Will", photo by HGS, Sept. 29, 2008

A Note About This Poem
The leaves on the oak trees in our backyard are beginning to turn a brilliant orange and yellow. As I was admiring the colourful show through our kitchen window early this morning, it reminded me of one of my rare rhyming poems, and the only attempt I’ve ever made at a villanelle.

I’m really terrible at definitions, and also at following “rules” in poetry, but in brief, a villanelle, made popular in English-language poetry in the 1800s and based on French poems in this form, is always 19 lines, and has only two rhyming sounds. It also has a refrain that repeats. Here is a better definition: The Villanelle

I tried. I really did. But my attempt ended up being 17 lines, and I didn’t exactly follow the rules – though I think I came close. I didn’t want my rhymes or the meaning of the poem to suffer simply because I needed a certain number of syllables or lines. I think this was the most challenging poem I’ve ever written. After writing this one, I have even more respect for the great rhyming poets. In case some of you were wondering, some of my favourites are Blake, Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dickinson, and Frost. I think my favourite may be a little-known American poet named Sarah Teasdale. I adore her poem, “Barter.” I’ll have to leave my Canadian and modern influences for another blog, as there are several.

Everyday Heroes

I met my friend Chris Needham when he was 30 and I was 14. As much as this could be construed as perverted, it was an innocent, wonderful, unique friendship—he was a sci-fi type film director in Ottawa, and I wanted to be a movie star.

My parents checked out all his credentials and references, and stayed pretty close to his side while he was making the first few movies with me and a cast of about six other people. It sounded odd for such responsible parents to be saying, “Our daughter Heather is making movies with a guy in his basement, and also in the countryside, just outside of Rockcliffe, Ontario,” but they had come to trust Chris like a friend—and I trusted him like a father.

I was lucky to know him for ten years, during that turbulent growing time we call the teenage years, but in hindsight, maybe I taught him a thing or two as well. He was a single man without any children, and I was a teenager who didn’t spare any details in telling him what my life was like.

Being a teenager wasn’t easy for me, because I wanted to be myself, when it seemed that all my friends wanted to be carbon copies of each other. Luckily, I discovered the freedom inherent in drama as a pre-teen, and met Chris when he was filming a presentation at our drama class. My parents must have decided that this harmless, kind man and his dramatic crowd were a much better influence on me than the girls who wanted to go underage drinking every single weekend in Hull, Quebec. So they were only too happy to chauffeur me around on “filming weekends.” And I loved returning to school on Monday to tell my friends about my unique adventures. All they had were stories of men harassing them in smoke-filled bars. But I could tell them what it felt like to have a plaster “life casting” made of my face , or how I’d spent the weekend learning how to sword fight on film with the help of two expert sword-fighters, or how cool it was that the local TV station, CJOH, was going to feature Chris’ film with me as its main character, “Valon of Sagron,” on its station as a pilot television show.

He made my life as a lonely teen a lot easier. He empathized with me, but he didn’t let me whine too much either. He called me “kiddo.” He took me under his wing and taught me the basics of scriptwriting, directing, and puppetry. He took care of me when the older members of the cast got rowdy, telling sexual jokes and so on, simply by escorting me away from them to talk about the script and what I was going to do that day on set.

I didn’t realize he was doing this at the time, but when I recently looked at behind-the-scenes video tapes of those days, I found my older friends were pulling funny stunts (it was a hot day so one of the guys dramatically stripped to his boxer shorts for the guy behind the camera; then mooned him)—things that Chris obviously thought were not suited for a 15-year-old girl’s eyes and ears.

All this time, I didn’t know that Chris was dealing with trials of his own: at just 16 he had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and given a year to live. He fell into a coma and lost that entire year of his life. Miraculously, he came out of the coma and lived many more years before the tumour became a problem again before his 40th birthday, although he developed diabetes and lost 80 percent of his eyesight in the mean time.

When I was 17, he had to have surgery to try to remove it. They succeeded in removing some but not all of it, and he was told he had a matter of months to live. Soon after he lost his job as a civil servant because he had become legally blind in one eye.

He used his free time to make another film in his basement—this time one with a cast of puppets called Just Jeffery. It was highly successful, picked up by CJOH T.V. to be produced in their studios as a series. Unfortunately, Chris was hospitalized and fell into a coma before he was able to help produce anything beyond the pilot episode.

When he was nearing the end of his terminal illness, his powers of observation were greatly heightened. Maybe it was the knowledge that he didn’t have much time left to take in the world around him; whatever it was, it helped him to save a few lives before he lost his own.

I’ll never forget Chris telling me how one night at a Swiss Chalet he had noticed a woman diner holding her hands around her throat. The people at her table were deep in conversation, totally oblivious that the woman was choking to death! Chris ran over and performed the Heimlich maneuver, dislodging a chicken bone that had become stuck in her esophagus.

A jolly-sized man with a bellowing laugh and a lazy eye, Chris was definitely not Disney’s next-pick for a hero character. And he knew it. But he certainly wasn’t prepared for what happened next.

The woman’s husband stood up and socked Chris—the lunatic trying to assault his wife—right in the jaw. BAM! When Chris woke up on the floor a few moments later, the whole group was gone. He was told by the restaurant staff to leave.

It wasn’t until later, when the woman explained to her husband what really happened, that Chris’s name was cleared and he was given permission to eat there again.

It seems that even when there is a hero among us, too often we fail to recognize him or her for their actions.

Chris was a hero every day of his too-short adult life to many other people. He played Santa Claus every year at Ottawa’s Children’s Hospital, reading to the children and telling them stories, but he only told a few souls, like me and his mother, that he did this. He didn’t want anyone to make a big deal over him about it.

Chris taught me many lessons—the importance of just being myself and making each day count—but the most important one was that everyday heroes do exist in our society. We just have to learn where to look, and open our eyes and ears.

Heather Grace Stewart
hgrace.com

On Death and Dandelions

The dandelions are beautiful this time of year.

Yes, I just wrote an ode to a weed.

Maybe you find that odd, but today I’m finding everything that I can see, smell, taste and touch absolutely beautiful, because today, I am mourning the sudden loss of a friend.

I didn’t know him very long – in fact, I’ve never met him – he was an online friend. But that doesn’t matter. He brought laughter and a new perspective into my life. He made me see things in a way I hadn’t seen them before – ironic, considering he was nearly 100 percent legally blind.

This afternoon, I went for a walk as thoughts of my friend filled my heart and mind. He no longer walks on this earth, but somehow, I saw, smelled, heard and felt things in a whole new way. His way.

It was as if I had been blind to the world’s beauty, and was seeing it for the first time. My senses were in overdrive.

The lilacs glowed a brilliant purple against the bright blue, cloudless sky.

The honeysuckle smelled so much sweeter than last year.

My lemonade tasted like that freshly squeezed glass you buy for a nickel from the happy little kid down the street, and it refreshed me like it was the hottest day of the summer.

The wind roared like the ocean as it rushed through the oak trees in our yard.

The sun felt soft and warm on my face.

My friend was still here May 23rd to sense the world’s incredible beauty – to smell the honeysuckle and feel the sun warming his face. Now he is gone.

He’s gone, but I’m alive, and I’m thinking: Why do so many of us wait so long to live our lives? Why do we make the mistake of thinking this is a dress rehearsal?

It’s not. This is it. This is all we’ve got.

And the dandelions, oh, they are so beautiful this time of year.

Copyright 2008, by Heather Grace Stewart
If you liked this, check out Heather’s poetry collection,

Where the Butterflies Go
http://www.lulu.com/content/1506907