AT HIGH FALLS, MINNESOTA

by Maxine Susman

 

I look across the gorge to Ontario—

same wilderness on the other side.

The great Falls plunge, three separate chutes,

over the bowl of ragged basalt cliffs

into the river flowing to Lake Superior.

Pounding roar, wall of spray, impassible—

here the voyageurs, bearing on their backs

more than their weight in beaver pelts,

slung their birch canoes onto their shoulders

and made le grand portage.

 

Wilderness ranges along the gorge

farther than the eye can travel.

United States / Canada / Gichi Onigamiig,

The narrow bed of Pigeon River

now the border between nations

that share the same terrain:

Falls, thick forest, gray cliffs of diabase.

I could almost hurl a rock across—

it would reach another country,

shared bedrock of Laurentian Shield.

 

Wilderness joins both sides together.

My father / myself,

his native land / and mine,

his parents' native land / and his,

our family river flowing over borders

from Belarus to Montreal,

from Ontario to New York.

I won't cross through Customs this time,

I'm close enough to know my father's laugh

inside the space inside the water

same on both sides of the Falls

my father's homeland a stone's throw away.

Maxine Susman, Highland Park, NJ, has published six chapbooks and two full-length books of poetry, most recently Northern Swim (Ragged Sky Press, 2024). Her work concerns the environment and natural world, history, art, people and other creatures. She has been leading poetry workshops for many years and she teaches poetry-writing at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of Rutgers University, earning the Distinguished Teaching Award. A Ginsberg Award finalist and multiple Pushcart nominee, her work has appeared in dozens of publications including Paterson Literary Review, Fourth River, Canary, Blueline, Slant, Earth’s Daughters, and Crab Orchard Review.

A GOD-GIVEN RIGHT

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

Giving the middle finger is a “God-given right,” Canadian judge rules. —The Guardian, March 10, 2023

A judge has ruled that if you are Canuck,

God gave to you a fundamental right

Of self-expression: use what rhymes with duck,

Deployed with off. Although it's not polite,

Good manners maketh not the man who gets

Insulted by a neighbour with a grudge

Vindictively repeating epithets

Expressing scorn. According to the judge,

No crime's committed if you flip the bird,

Rebuffing smears. In all his decades while

In court, no feebler case was ever heard:

Good sense, he said, would see the case's file

Hurled out the window——but, in Montreal,

The courthouse has no windows, none at all!

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Daily Mail, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, the Washington Post, and WestWard Quarterly.