The Way to Come Home

By Carolyn Smart

The Way to Come Home is Carolyn Smart's fourth book of poems. It is a collection that ranges from celebrating the rural landscape north of Kingston, Ontario to re-creating the painful last phase of her friend Bronwen Wallace's life in a moving sequence titled "The Sound of the Birds." The volume's opening sequence, "Cape of Storms," views the hatred thriving amid the astonishing physical beauty of South Africa while "The woman is bathing" details a journey to Costa Rica that is a journey into the self. The outward eye is as acute as the inward in this powerful book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 1992
• ISBN: 9781771310154

Carolyn Smart

Carolyn Smart has written six previous collections of poetry, including The Way to Come Home (Brick Books, 1993), and Hooked: Seven Poems (Brick Books, 2009). Her memoir At the End of the Day (Penumbra Press, 2001) won first prize in the 1993 CBC Literary Contest. Smart is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and an editor for the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series of McGill-Queen’s University Press; since 1989 she has taught Creative Writing at Queen’s University. She lives with her family in the country north of Kingston.

Book preview

The Way To Come Home

Carolyn Smart

Brick Books

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Smart, Carolyn.

        The way to come home

Poems.

ISBN 0-919626-56-4

1. Title.

PS8587.M37W3  1992    C811′.54    CP2-093602-4

PR9199.3.S53W3  1992

Copyright © Carolyn Smart, 1992.

The support of The Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council is gratefully acknowledged. The support of the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation is also gratefully acknowledged.

Typeset in Ehrhardt, printed and bound by Coach House Printing. The stock is acid-free Zephyr Antique laid.

Fourth Printing, June 2006.

Brick Books

Box 20081, 431 Boler Road

London, Ontario N6K 4G6

[e-mail]

Contents

Cape of Storms

the women is bathing

The Sound of the Birds

Home : A Calendar

The moon and the sun are travellers through eternity. Even the years wander on. Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing towards old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

Basho

Oku no hosamichi

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Upon one bush, three colours:

powder white, lilac, soft blue, a star

exploding with fragrance

I have opened a door into a new life,

what were the countries I left behind,

a life I thought I was familiar with

In the early morning the ibis flies

to roost, its dark call Hah-de-dah

dips a long curved beak

into my dream

draws me from sleep

On the roadside in Hillbrow

a small black child is dancing,

‘the time of my life’ she sings

The suburbs below drowning

in the thick perfume of flowers,

each walled garden and then the veld

burst open

For my mother, who loved Southern Africa, although she never went there

We drove at night down Alleman's Kraal Road near the hippo pools. There was a man named Johnson who could see like an owl in the dark. He spoke Shangaan and pointed in amongst the trees: zebra running behind us on the road, red dust drifting in the spotlights. All I could think of was you, mother, who loved to watch the zebra herds running in their paddocks at the Metro Zoo.

Later we ate dinner in the boma, impala meat on skewers and the good redwine of the country. A million southern stars, a sky I never expected to see and did not know my way in. I raised a glass to you then and tried to push away that old grief. Earlier I heard a lioness call to the rest of her pride: a short, low cough as she passed us by, her golden eyes.

In the evening, a woman told me that years ago she was lonely for her small son far