New Poem by Joe Rosenblatt

Eyewear is very pleased to offer a new poem by Joe Rosenblatt this Monday.

Rosenblatt was born in Toronto in 1933. He dropped out of trade school as a young adult and worked at a series of low-paying jobs until he started working as a laborer for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1956. By 1966 he had his first book of poetry published and he also received a Canada Council grant which allowed him to leave his job as a freight handler of the old Canadian Pacific Railway and devote the next year to writing and traveling. Over the years, Rosenblatt has written more than 20 books of poetry, several autobiographical works and his poems have appeared in over thirty anthologies of Canadian poetry over his forty year career as a poet. His poetry books have received major awards, such as the Governor General's award for poetry in 1976 and the BC Book Prize in 1986. For the past 30 years he has been living in a beach resort community of Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.
Predator

Affixed on an artist completing a sketch
a steely emperor on the highest branch stirs

as from a partially-eaten dream, to fit
a curious repast inside a basaltic gaze.

Talons ready, he’ll swoop down, seize
what he’s mistaken for scrumptious quarry

And like some warrior god , he’ll swiftly jet
skyward to a nest filled with fragmentary bones;

Yet Ken keeps on sketching that statuary bird
who sketches him in the carborundum silence.

poem by Joe Rosenblatt

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

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