Ariadne’s note: We continue the World Poetry Canada International Peace Festival update with Empowered Poet  and World Poetry Member Betty Scott. Welcome back! Also please check the calendar on the top bar for coming events in September.

After the World Poetry Festival, Betty Scott participated in the 2^nd annual Chuckanut Writer’s Conference, performing several of her own poems and presenting workshops. Her summer has been devoted to fine-tuning her first book of poems: A Courtroom and a Waterfall: Odes to the Spirit which takes readers through grief to spiritual awareness. She says the manuscript is finally ready for submission.

 She is also revising poems for her second collection, as well as teaching, editing and tutoring other writers. Below is the opening poem from A Courtroom and a Waterfall.

All Aboard the Give It Up For

When bawdy politics
Breed the sins
Of human greed

And when fear and anger
Break our fragile
Planetary needs

Or when time juxtaposes
And we arrive
At grief-ly junctures

Then imagine families
Of the world carried
On the Give It Up For,

A train that to transform
drops the i and glides
On a very long track

And imagine prophetic poets,
The heirs of stories to unfold,
who set the table, prepare

The feast and rearrange
The plot for living brothers,
Forgotten sisters

And spirits of the dead,
And imagine the rust and
Hum of words that tunnel

From hearts and brains
Through arteries and veins,
Soul to soul and back again

Since OnceUpon a Time
Is never once
Upon a time

But the clap and tap
And heartbeat of the past—
Inside—And be forewarned

For clamor turns
A feast into a trough
Passing as we are

Through time
And moving out,
and even though

The Give It Up For
Runs on wheels, slick
With grief beginning

Eons ago, imagine now
On the Give It Up For
We forgo shame that brings

More pain, the lust
For things and fame,
And that glamorous ruse

Of crowning one as best,
Mightier than all the rest,
And imagine no one shouts,

Gossips, diminishes or demeans,
Criticizes, syllabalizes,
Trivializes or blames

For poems are tasty morsels
Of longings and belongings
And we, Dear Readers,

Have always been the Chosen Ones,
To raise and up-hold,
To transform and transcend,

And so for us the poets sing:
Though grief is always with us,
We’re crossing any way.

 By Betty Scott (C)