CAROLYN MARIE SOUAID: A NEW POEM


Carolyn Marie Souaid writes: Although written pre-Pandemic, something speaks to me now in this poem— perhaps the idea that we are all just a small piece of a much larger picture, that we are not the centre of the universe and that our time on this planet is limited. Understanding this is liberating.

Carolyn Marie Souaid
AND SO, THE WIND


I awoke to handfuls of light,
the cool wind pressing through a window.
Undulating curtains.
My blood sugar spiked, energy pumped
through my body’s meridians.
I was as open
as new life blinking into the sun
for the first time,
a blank slate, ignorant
of our long, dark, collective history:
sooty traces of the Industrial Revolution
coating our lungs. Unaware
of the naysayers and conspiracy theorists,
fascists and colonizers
fighting like wolves for the scraggy earth,
however fucked up;
I marked an X on the great,
white marble museums
rigged with dynamite and set for extinction,
erudite civilizations
detonating into the atmosphere.

And so, the wind.

It came to me, in a shallow breath, that nothing mattered,
nothing at all,

it addressed me by name, this flush wind,
it rippled through me,
it rose and fell like a tribe of women, dancing.

Montrealer Carolyn Marie Souaid is the author of seven books of poetry and a novel.