Ada Dahli

What's been yours?
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That fortnight channel now through
elliptical ecliptic erotic springs
rustle and sway tidal murmurs
this, it's this, this may be that big
treat this as sacred, other and I
that which is about neither
bebbe bull shooting to a sun
shadows in copper blood

spewing poetry wonders
who's whose in love
when will this question dissolve

hope insistent
that tendrilled yokes of old holdings can slip their grip
a palm resting over its unmantling heart
feels the palm of an other placed over its dorsum
both gestures returned
building switches for circuits
speed makes love to slowly
slowly loves speeds healing

sovereign lovers sprouting through the soil

Jan of 2010 I received my very first stamp in my very stiff passport in Lviv, Ukraine. The airport terminal could pass for a train station in any small southwestern Ontario town.

The cobbled streets fascinated me until a friend nudged me to look up as we walked into the city. It was Christmas Eve. I was taken to homes of friends, their friends and their families. I was taken in.

For a month I was taken in over and over. I took it in. Was still too young to understand that I couldn't possibly take it all in. It felt like I was experiencing culture for the first time and I wondered what that meant. That thing people talk about, love and live with yet I had no equivalent at the time. I could appreciate it, but didn't understand. I didn't know yet that I was a cultural orphan, wide eyed, endearingly out of place, but that never came up. I was just taken in and loved.

The food, the faces, the travels, the music, the comradery, the rib jiving, the carolling door to door, the toasts after every bite, the voices, the staggering beauty even in the dead of winter. The orphanage, the churches, the art, the accent, the land, the language, the moody-misted nights, the KGB prison, the opera, the library, mulled wine, crooked naked trees, the street corners, the markets.

When I left for Poland, left the last dinner in Ukraine to catch a midnight train. Standing in the apt hallway, waiting for the elevator, the apt door wide open with faces smiling, hands waving from floor to archway wishing me luck and giving thanks for our meeting.

It was Lviv. It is Ukraine. Now in an eruption of war, but the aggression enacted upon them is not new. War aggression is not new but f**k is it getting real old.


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It is Syria. It is Yemen. It is Afghanistan.

It is central African Republic. It is Mexico. It is America. It is the UK. It is Canada.

It is Europe, the Americans, Asia, every island every piece of land and all of us are touched.

Let us find where and how we and each of us can fight, uplift, protect, speak out, and contribute in our ways. Reach towards, midwife and live into better ways as these old systems crumble and dissolve.