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    A Season of Mourning
    A Season of Mourning
    A Season of Mourning
    Ebook37 pages9 minutes

    A Season of Mourning

    By Frances Itani

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Frances Itani's third book of poetry consists of two deeply moving elegiac sequences commemorating the deaths of a sister and friend. In chaste and determinedly unsentimental language, Itani takes us through the crises all must face, ignoring none of their turbulence or anguish, yet leaving us with a renewed sense of humanity. In these two sequences, she accomplishes inspiring acts of homage and remembrance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateSep 15, 1988
    ISBN9781771311298
    A Season of Mourning
    Author

    Frances Itani

    FRANCES ITANI has written eighteen books. Her novels include That’s My Baby; Tell, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; Requiem, chosen by the Washington Post as one of the top fiction titles of 2012; Remembering the Bones, published internationally and shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; and the #1 bestseller Deafening, which won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Published in seventeen territories, Deafening was also selected for CBC’s Canada Reads. A three-time winner of the CBC Literary Prize, Frances Itani is a Member of the Order of Canada and the recipient of a 2019 Library and Archives Canada Scholars Award. She lives in Ottawa.

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      Book preview

      A Season of Mourning - Frances Itani

      Poppies

      A SEASON OF MOURNING

      for my sister Marilyn

      (1939 -1984)

      Missed Seasons

      I could not have known until this spring

      how we lost the seasons of last year

      how the days withered from winter to fall

      how they dropped away as if we no longer

      had the right to them

      Our own huddle we unwillingly formed

      learning, creating the new

      distended shape of fear swelling

      inward in concentric rings, consuming

      while we were unaware

      What I remember of last summer is this:

      a single hummingbird trembling at your window

      I was standing, teacup in hand

      in one of those long silences

      we had begun to frequent.

      Behind me, you were saying

      I feel as if I'm dying

      One other thing I remember:

      walking down the long aisle behind your coffin

      I came out into stifling

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