Margaret Avison

Born at the end of worldwide massacre

Like a dawn of new hope and second chance,

Her life blooms in Ontario’s acre

Under music and wealth and joy and dance.

Meanwhile, soldiers trip back from battle lines,

Seeking repose from bloodshed and grieving.

Instead they find themselves wrapped in stiff vines,

And no industry fit for good working.

Struggling to recover from minds lost,

Canadians start trade and industry.

Roads sprout out from the thawing winter frost

and electronics can be reached swiftly.

Consumer confidence expands credit

and stocks exchange wide hands without worry.

Fortune grows so fast no one can stop it

'Till like a balloon pops prosperity.

Depression strikes and though she is secure,

Gloom pervades North America’s soft souls.

“Revolution must arise over here,”

Say they seeking refuge from their toils.

Through fog, her parents piano and sing

and her grandfather brings stories to life.

Family stories and Bible acting

Nurture the child all through healing and strife.

But still the crops for food and life can't grow,

and Ontario's industry withers.

Though welfare programs grow, no one does know

how to support their fathers and mothers.

Transformation bursts forth from their red hearts,

In a frailty God’s strong seed is planted.

She writes language, a gift of expression

With glowing courage that is demanded.

God's love through our barren minds and hearts and

Revolution's key in the poetry.

They manifest in Avison's small hand

For they are much needed right here, you see.

As a teenager she expresses feelings

through her writing (in a club!) and music.

Hospitalization provides her wings,

Compassion for poor awakes when she's sick.

At eighteen she enters Victoria

And earns a B.A. in much-loved English.

After working jobs comes euphoria;

She gets a M.A., a college school wish.

In her jobs manifests her writing love;

She's a file clerk, reader, librarian,

researcher, writer, editor, and dove

not to mention humanitarian.

She flies poems to her country's forum,

attracting attention of Smith and more.

She is probably seen as bright aurum

Though she's expressing her beliefs at core.

Meanwhile, troopers march back to battle lines

As fog comes again on little cat feet.

But it stays to carry its designs,

Impaling children, expressing defeat.

During great War Two, people learn regret.

She recognizes human need for love

In her poetry she will not forget

those dead from hate that killed the One above.

Not pursuing a career, seeking freedom

and a voice cutting through the injustice,

she has knives and gauze to light a beacon;

communication can end in justice.

Writing a textbook about her loved land

and translating poems from Hungary

brings her closer to Earth's grains of fine sand,

it brings down to Earth her soaring journey.

As Westerns explored for new traditions,

they focused on new Eastern religion

while Avison received her envisions

in form of a Guggenheim provision.

The sixties sees her with a Winter Sun,

a poetry book about barrenness.

The mind and spirit must wait for spring's fun;

they wait with faith for salvation (bird's nest).

Early poems also express power;

natural, myths, and supernatural.

They beat you and make you strongly flower

But you can't find (without faith) the apple.

Nineteen sixty-three transforms civil rights

but there's a revolution in her, too.

Her skepticism of God and her ice

melts away -- she knows God again, it's true!

First afraid faith would displace writing,

She's overjoyed with creativity.

She attends where poets are uniting,

Though her dad dies (more responsibility).

The Dumbfounding shows some things can't be wrote,

though we try as we may to express it.

The only thing we can do is devote

ourselves to God's wondrous love and Light.

Or maybe description is possible;

The dimensions of one word can paint it.

Childhood is full of the impossible,

We can describe it with the word fullness.

A decade later sees her with Sunblue,

a book containing Bible interpretations.

there is also contrast that tickles you;

Secrets and sun-like imaginations.

The nineteen-nineties sees women in space;

It also sees her with her book, No Time.

We must waste no time clinging to God's grace;

our desperate existence hangs on to His chime.

Concrete and Wild Carrot has life's basics;

Simple wondering of watering facts

like how nature has beauty and patience,

is limitless, wild, but concrete, like flax.

Momentary Dark delves deeper into life;

Into the light, the dark, and our beliefs.

Poetry wanders into love and strife,

As Avison nears the time of relief.

She is now Listening, and listening quietly;

she clings to God, safe, but shaky with fear.

She presses on with some anxiety,

but she knows she'll finish her duty here.

She takes a glance over her speech to the world,

which explores reason and imagining,

God's love and salvation fully unfurled,

and our need for life, to show them the spring.

She marvels at the awards from Griffin,

the two Governor General awards,

the worldly attention to what was in

privacy but exuberance of hearts.

Though dead at the end of a worldwide birth

She lives on through poetry, blessing Earth.

The question of life, then falls to you:

With God's great gift of life, what will you do?