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    You can’t bury them all
    You can’t bury them all
    You can’t bury them all
    Ebook136 pages1 hour

    You can’t bury them all

    By Patrick Woodcock

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    About this ebook

    Patrick Woodcock has spent the past seven years engaging with and being shaped by the people, politics, and landscapes of the Kurdish north of Iraq, Fort Good Hope in the Northwest Territories, and Azerbaijan. His powerful new collection offers a poetry that simultaneously explores hope and horror while documenting the transformative processes of coping. You can’t bury them all follows the narratives we construct to survive the tragic failures of our humanity to their very end: everything that’s buried by snow, dirt, and ash, just like everything that’s buried by politics, homophobia, sexism, racism, religion, and history is resurrected, demanding to be heard and addressed.

    In Woodcock’s poetry, how we deal with what resurfaces is the key. What do those who suffer really mean to those who have abandoned them to small, conscience-soothing charitable donations or the occasional tweet? How can the poet, or anyone else, sleep at night knowing homosexuals are being thrown off building tops, after one steps into a hole and finds an abandoned corpse in an Azeri cemetery, or after the elders of an Aboriginal community are left helpless against those who only want to exploit them? Still, You can’t bury them all demonstrates that the world is not just the horrific place the media often portrays. In each of the worlds he touches, Woodcock discovers a spirit and strength to celebrate.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherECW Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2016
    ISBN9781770908734
    You can’t bury them all

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      Book preview

      You can’t bury them all - Patrick Woodcock

      Hasanov

      Yan Kurdistan

      . . . Yan Naman*

      *Kurdish for Give me Kurdistan or give me death.

      28.2°N 34.1°W (le)

      ¹

      The Kurdish propane tank is an archive of apparitions, an urn of celestial ashes. You can hear them at night, tumbling off trucks, the criers of the curb—calling to children, chasing away dogs. I spent many nights striking at them in Duhok, in pursuit of that sound—voice—victorious spark.

      When I was a child, I used to sneak out and skip stones off the rippled moon gamboling on Lake Ontario. It was there I learned that water and stone and moonlight could forge incandescent beads. But only in dreams could I swim out and consume these softened flames. Everything is far prettier when reflected at night. Later I learned that if you skipped enough words off the page a few would leave dents. I am not sure these days. Stones seem to sink too often or skip in the wrong direction.

      Dear Isabelle, don’t look at people like me directly. Don’t memorize objects but the shadows they cast. Let the tree branches around your parents’ house reorganize the landscape. Let snow and what it blankets hearten not haunt you. Believe that craters on the moon are dents designed and deepened by children skipping stones off their unstoned dreams and that some of these children are much taller and wider and older than you.

      1 – for Isabelle MacKay (b. December 16, 2010)

      Amedi

      I

      The blue blanket above the stillborn mountain,

      the car clawing at the road, slow enough for women—

      older than the mountain—to tap me on the shoulder

      and offer me a beach ball. Amedi, you look

      like a jawbone at first blush. We rush to you.

      The veins of your neck, the spittle of your staircase,

      the nerves stretching skyward in search of other nerves.

      You cannot go out. You must go up.

      Higher than the others. The other mountains who

      allowed the cavity to enter and the cavity to grow.

      Amedi, we are closer, winding past graffiti. Who

      is Nabil? Who is Oppressed? Why Mesopotamia?

      Once inside and abandoned, we walked out through

      a gap in your incisors. Crown and curse the Turks.

      Remove their cement with a jackhammer.

      II

      You will make a wood palette of the small oak. Take

      the red-brown, orange and blues of the juniper berries.

      The white, brown and black of the Egyptian vulture.

      The wealth of greys from the Eurasian griffons, the gold

      and light orange of Radde’s accentor. Amedi will take

      its red from the beak and legs of the white stork,

      the browns and greys from the partridge and the orange

      of the white-throated robin. The yellow of the cinereous

      bunting, the blue of the nuthatch and the slate black

      of the Syrian woodpecker. The orange flank of the masked

      shrike, the forehead of the red-fronted siren. Amedi

      will remove the black eye mask and cut the white throat

      of the Orphean warblers, tear the yellow bill from the alpine

      chough, siphon the greenish grey of the ortolan bunting

      and feed upon the bluish grey of the sombre tit.

      III

      I looked out at you as rain fell and my vodka warmed—

      as my kerosene heater leaked and Momus sang. I heard

      Imaduddin Al-Zanki’s hammers. I saw an old caravan

      arriving at Bab Zebar—heard them arguing about taxes.

      I heard David calling to his followers. I heard the Blind

      Agha’s tyranny and the magic arts die. I opened my window

      and heard Menahemites crying for they could not fly. I saw

      Amedi and David D’Beth Hillel with wealthy merchants,

      workmen and cattle. I could hear Aramaic, Kurmanji, horses

      and engines. I saw a people leaving in 1933. God, this vodka

      and kerosene . . . I saw myself swimming above and below you

      with the Inspired One, burning and drowning, gasping for air

      as each bubble that left me transformed into jewellery

      for the pasha’s wife. I saw her hand touch my lips. I saw

      a safe haven and others sleeping . . . what will death be like? ²

      IV

      Above the green and the white and the red, around the sun

      is the blue. A different blue. Not the blue of the policeman

      or the Egyptian blue on his cigarette pack. Not the cracked

      azure frame around the corner store’s window or the teal

      dress on the child playing with her brothers. Not the ubiquitous

      iris in every kitchen I drank tea, nor the Palestine blue

      I could never mention. Not the blue of the dejected, nor

      the blue of melancholy. Not the indecent films downloaded.

      Not the blue of faith abandoned, nor the blue of faith renewed.

      Not the sapphire of their curtains, nor the cyan on their pipes.

      Not the Persian, never Persian, nor the royal blue of their

      cars. Not the deep sky or Alice blue from the rug I sit upon.

      But all these. Partially. Place all of these on a sheet of glass,

      tilt it—let them blend and

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