Featured poet Alan Hill
World Poetry Cafe Radio Show Guest Host Oparin Ortiz and Host Ariadne Sawyer welcomed Alan Hill in a special telephone inteview in which he shared his poems and talked about the upcoming World Poetry Canada & International Peace Festival in May, 2012. To listen to the radio show and to hear Alan and e-poet from India, Samarendra Patra, please CLICK HERE!
Alan Hill lives in New Westminster, British Columbia and has been writing since 2001. He has been published in Canada by CV2, Canadian Literature, Antigonish Review and the Vancouver Review. He has also been published in ‘Rocksalt’, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue Publishing 2008)
The Upstairs Country
Above us
in our postcard sized
spare room
our nanny has the Philippines
through Skpe connected live
to her sons and mother
that she has pixilated here,
hot wired
into our Canadian winter
her bus driver husband
just home from work,
bathing in the wallow
of his unfiltered cigarettes,
blows smoke
through our floorboards
tropical birds chirp
laughter
the wind
slugs slovenly
through the palm trees
into our stairwell.
Last Sunday a typhoon
shook the ceiling
sprinkled plaster
over Peter Mansbridge
as he read
the evening news
we heard the squeaking
of leaping furniture
as her whole family
sheltered
in panic
under the bed
the sound of a car
being hastily reversed
Into a bedside cabinet
the crack of our
upstairs windows being shut
and blinds drawn
as the ocean flooded in.
Alan Hill (c)
Wow! I’m in awe of this blast into a world of bilingual multicultural international love of poetry made possible through technology via Facebook via the Internet through my head phones as I listen from chilly autumnal England! Words transport me to several other worlds in one programme. I am too in awe of the poems ! Thank you!
Thank you so much! I sent it on to our wonderful World Poetry Cafe Radio Team.
I hope to read it at our http://www.worldpoetry.ca 1st year celebration on November 23rd.
What a great gift!