Thoughts from a Gratitude Journal

So much seems trivial
studying the sun-kissed tulip
blossoming in the clear glass jar
at my bedside:
be beautiful
stretch toward the light.

Sun-Kissed by Heather Grace Stewart

Instinct

Golden sunshine shimmers
on this lazy lake
like sequins. A lone cormorant
flaps its wings incessantly,
as if in defiance
of the coming cold.
Oblivious couples walk
arm in arm beneath
the weeping willows,
kicking up dead leaves like
forgotten arguments.
They sport only t-shirts—
the joggers, shorts—
as if wearing them
will impede the inevitable:
snow, sleet, heavy traffic,
Christmas crowds,
cell-phones ringing
in the middle of a movie.

The cormorant spreads his wings
and praises the sun;
preening on his rightful throne,
unaware that winter is late this year—
going by instinct because
that is all he knows.

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)

Thank-you, Dear Readers

I’ve just received another Certificate of Donation from Unicef. This is my second Gift of Education donation and third charitable donation to educational causes using proceeds from sales of Where the Butterflies Go. Thanks for buying the book and making a big difference in the lives of needy children (and in their communities–the Gift also covers part of their teacher’s salary for a year). Now I understand what words can do. Everything.  If you haven’t yet, please check out my poetry collection here and pass the link along to others. If you’d like an autographed copy shipped to your home, it’s easy to arrange–just drop me a line here. I’d like to keep going–so much more can be done.

Thanks also for commenting on my poems and stories; for letting me know when and how they’ve touched you. You brighten my days and keep me creating.

Heather

Gift of Education

There Will Be Giants

I was watching the morning news with our 4-year-old daughter, and couldn’t help but say aloud, “Oh no, Ted Kennedy died.”

I usually try to hide the heavier topics from her but for some reason, I didn’t this time. I thought she could handle it.

“Who was he?” she asked me.

“A pretty important politician in the States. People are going to be sad,” I replied.

She put her arm around me. “Well, did he get a chance to help people in the world before he died?”

I nearly spit out my coffee. “Yes, honey, I think all in all, he did.”

“Well, that’s good then.” And back she went to colouring Dora and Diego.

Everything became clearer to me in one short conversation with a four-year-old. We’ve lost a lot of Giants this summer,
but that loss seems a little less overwhelming when we look to the giant potential of our younger generations.

We just need to keep on listening to them, and pointing them in the right direction.

The Pilot

Little girl,
golden curls bouncing,
tries to run in
lime green rain boots.

“Hi Daddy! Look! It’s
Daddy!” she shrieks,
quickens her pace to greet him.
Arms up high.
Full speed ahead.
Lips pursed in concentration,
she jumps, groans, tries to
touch the sun.
We laugh, but
stop ourselves from
saying, “you can’t.”

Little girl,
golden curls bouncing,
runs home in rain boots,
dreaming of jet planes.

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.

“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)