Rishma Dunlop
Rishma Dunlop Poems
I slice oranges in the kitchen.
The countertop worn, notched
with the story of the knife.
...
At times I've travelled far from you─
brought to my knees by want
in white rooms in distant cities
...
All winter in stucco on 65th I learned to love
what couldn't speak: what began in milk and
blood. Baby, cat, the man who worked long weeks
away from home. Forty below. My breath before me,
...
The volume of Tolstoy thumbs her open.
She tries to keep the heroine alive.
...
In my dream my father brings me tea on a tray,
chota hazari in the early hours of morning,
like the servant in his boyhood—
...
The air above the city is saturated
with prayers. Like the air in
industrial towns and dreams
...
Chet Baker on the stereo—
I imagine his Caravaggio face, heroin-
ruined in the single spot, as the horn comes
...
Rishma Dunlop Biography
Rishma Dunlop was born in India in 1956 to Sikh parents who immigrated to Canada in 1958. Dunlop grew up in Beaconsfield, Quebec. She earned an M.A. from the University of British Columbia in 1994. In her Ph.D. thesis from the University of British Columbia (1999) entitled Boundary Bay: A Novel as Educational Research, she explores ancestral roots in India. Rishma Dunlop is an award winning Canadian poet, playwright, essayist, and translator. She has published five books of poetry: Lover Through Departure: New and Selected Poems (2011), White Album (2008), Metropolis (2005), Reading Like a Girl (2004), and The Body of My Garden (2002). Her other books and journals as editor include: An Ecopoetics Reader: Art, Literature and Place (2008); White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood (2007), and Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets (2004). She received the Emily Dickinson Prize for Poetry in 2003, and has been a three-time finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in Poetry and Non-Fiction.)
The Best Poem Of Rishma Dunlop
Seeing
Oh my city, emerald
buried in ravines, coyotes
prowl your meridians,
I am writing from the road,
I had to see clearly
the single world
I could describe to you
the lemon groves, the beggared streets,
palaces of gold and marble.
All the cities I traveled
to sit in cafés,
to feel the underword of subways,
to see vanquished cities burned,
men and woman cradling the slain,
jilted sweethearts in every theatre,
to know
there is no consolation except in desire,
only the occasional small bird singing,
a temporary clearing of the disorder of things,
that flushes the throats of politicians and warriors,
pours a river of poetry through the larynx
In the city of the future
the world is bandaging its limbs
against wholesale murder,
bombed schoolyards.
From the crazed skulls of highrises,
needle towers on love's black sea,
the wind overturns someone's sail,
The city is a glass book.
Open it with an unflinching hand of
a severed arm. Read the pages
to the lilt of a nightingale.
The sights and fires of
your streets are cleaved
to me. You stand immutable.
Beauty is in the coming home.
What is ordinary is not possible anymore.
Your towers rise in me.
A different wind turns the vane.
What I am waiting for
is just now being born.
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