Category Archives: GRAYHURST

Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Three times nominated for Sundress Publications “Best of the Net” 2015, she has over 950 poems published in over 400 international journals. She has twelve published books of poetry, seven collections, nine chapbooks, and a chapbook pending publication. She lives in Toronto with her family. She is a vegan. She also sculpts, working with clay.

Poetry from Allison Grayhurst

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Allison Grayhurst

Allison Grayhurst

Naked Side
 
 
 
I’ve seen the destruction
of visions, the penetration
of a good cause, seen souls
anesthetized by sadness.
 
The only constant is endurance,
is the thing that jumps out from
the void then reverses back
into its indifferent swallow.
 
One change, then the moment
slips into a new glimpse of understanding.
 
One small desire fulfilled and all pain
is humbled.
 
 
 
 

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Poetry from Allison Grayhurst

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Looking In
 
How easy to feel the weight
of choice, mutually
with the burden of circumstance.
Childhood ripens then wilts,
and in your unguarded hands, only
shades of poverty-stricken
summers remain; enormous & unavoidable.
 
What is real is not always the same as
what is eternal, yet those days,
when overabundant with love,
reappear, and strangely, make a difference.
 
You hold a torch, moving urgently through aqueducts
towards icy light. When you reach
the blue loneliness of abstraction, secretly
you are sure
the fullness of truth has rushed away
from you; and that this knowledge
too, is unusable.
 
You flourish beside the lightheaded angels. You carve
in stone, in vain
their god-affirming songs. You stand
outside, alarmed. You disappear.
 
Time hangs in your thoughts like an imaginary lover.
You look in the mirror and see
a great void, a perfect smile . . . and see
there is still so much left
to learn.

 

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Poetry from Allison Grayhurst

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New Wheel – The Passage of Arnik

(king of a small land)

Part 1

My skin was stone,

drenched in an accelerant and

lit on fire. And there I burned,

a flaming rock impassable by

every woman and man who

tried to cross my shore. My fire

was final, a never-dying-heat

guarding the dead cold core

beneath its frantic dance.

Murder was easy as was laughing,

glaring bold-faced at the sun,

but languishing in waters, still or stormy,

was never my game, only, swift, loveless striking,

blistering and charring, beating with a spike

any imagined challenge to my seat in the center.

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Poetry from Allison Grayhurst

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 Love is not a shell
  
I tell you I am waiting for a new friend
to share these beautiful riches, to feel
safe with and to feel whole.
I tell you I am waiting for new and
permanent members of our clan – for all of us
here, striving for rich connection and finding
that most people will only go so far, most people
blend in without steam and then move on, on to where
the demands of intimacy are minimal and accountability
means making, defending, excuses.
I tell you I am happy for those who walk with me, and
my arms are open. Food is on the table.
 
 
By the edge,
  
the fire drifted from the sands
and all my tribe bit the bolt
hard. For life was hard,
and our ceremonies of perseverance,
of letting go, and of holding on
were all we had.
Shadows and senselessness walked
across our movie screen.
I put it all in our backyard –
the carcasses of mourned dead animals,
the memories of betrayal and grief, people
that never tried and those
that tried but just not hard enough.
I put them there and buried them close to the fence,
behind the evergreens, near where the sandbox used to be.
I told everyone tales of ‘true blue’
and the phone would ring
and then it would stop
and everyone of us held hands. We prayed.
We knew this was just a time of scarcity and soon
it would be a time of plenty:
We knew the joy of loving one another.
 

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