publishing poetry only
 



Monday's Poem




© 2011 Michael Kleiza

Michael Kleiza has read his poetry in a number of venues including the Eden Mills Writers' Festival, Hillside Festival and the Art Bar in Toronto. He helps out as a member of the poetry editorial staff of the University of Guelph literary magazine Carousel, and is part of a team that judges submissions to the Eden Mills Fringe Contest. He has been published in a local anthology of poets and artists and Off the Shelf, a local bookstore publication. He has won The Bookshelf Poetry Prize and has been twice shortlisted for the Winston Collins/Descant Poetry Prize. He has hosted spoken word events and lives in Guelph. His manuscript titled "Love, War, and Some Things In-Between" has been, in general, rejected by all publishers who have looked at it.


Found

This flat, scarpjawed rockscape held you,
made you recombinant
in bleached Silurian dolostone,
reef-petrified coral, and ice-breached cliff.

Cradled, bedded,
au naturel in bas-relief, you were stone
long before my kind -- conceived
in ooze -- ventured into air.

Rare jeweled, in line and shape
you lay here now, on these remnant shores
where, in an ancient sea, split-eons ago
you schooled and swam
unaware of the squidquick eye
that tracked your path, until
by flash and strike, a lipless maw
caught and cracked you in mid-stroke
to bleed and spiral,
fall to final rest
a half-billion years from where,
in this present place, my hands
now do their timely work.

You are the corpus delicti
found from rake and shift of these remains
here, on Huron's shore, where
cool waves tongue
my tree-ape feet.