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Cecily Ross Poetry Collection

Cecily Ross Poetry Collection

Featured in issue 16 of Dreamers Magazine.

Turtle Crossing the Road

I don’t know why I started for the other side. Except
It was an urgency that could not be denied.
The pavement on my scaly toes felt hard and hot, but
Smoother than a fallen log. Slow and steady Aesop said.
I knew if I could get across that asphalt strait
My destiny would meet me and
This great burden, this boggy
Bequest would be delivered.

I’m slow at the best of times but when
The first dark shadow hurtled overhead
Exhaling furious gusts of poison and gas
I pulled inside myself, lurched inward,
A painted shell pressed flat against disaster—
Still as a rock. Another shadow thundered over,
And another and another until the very earth quaked,
Until I thought here it is—the end.

And then, the rapture. An unseen hand
Or was it angel wings spirited me aloft
And carried me over the blasted road and
Laid me down gently by the still waters
Of a silver stream. And there in an extravagance
Of gratitude I laid these eggs my gift
To the world. You, who do not believe
In miracles, think on this.

What Will Survive of Us?

Lolling there on the spruce-green lake,
Listing like the deck of the Titanic,
An abandoned dock leans
Against a huge hunk of granite,
Rock of ages, a leviathan upholding
The rotting raft as it sinks imperceptibly
To its inevitable end.

On the darkened shore magisterial pines,
Cedars, and oaks preside with profound
Indifference over the slow dissolution of what
Not long ago was a stage for human
Amusement, a platform of childlike pleasure.
Listen, and over the sound of the wind
In the trees and the loons and the bees

You can almost hear the squeals
Of children laughing, splashing, diving
All through the long hot afternoons
As though summer would never end.
Ghost children on a ghost dock,
A dock succumbing now to time
And the weather, to the persistence of weeds

Pushing up through the cracks —
Tiny ferns, cushions of moss, gray green lichen
Creeping its infinitesimal creep
Into forever. What if, I thought as
I floated in the shallows in the silence
Of an August evening, what if this
Is what will survive of us, not love,

But this: a forgotten dock beside an
Ageless rock, governed by raccoons
And muskrats their scat brown and dry
Beside the remnants of lunch: an opalescent
Clam shell shimmering like a butterfly,
The bleached exo-skeleton of a crayfish,
A cigarette butt wedged between the slats?

Cecily Ross

About the Author – Cecily Ross

Cecily Ross is an award-winning writer and editor, and author of two books: a novel, The Lost Diaries of Susanna Moodie (HarperCollins Canada) and a memoir, Love in the Time of Cholesterol (Viking Canada, McGraw-Hill, U.S.). She has worked as an editor and writer at The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, Harrowsmith, The Cobourg Star and The Peterborough Examiner. Her writing has appeared as in The New York Times, Chatelaine, ON Nature and Zoomer Magazine and Literary Review of Canada. Her poems have appeared in Canadian Literature and Dark Winter.

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