Sitting outside on my porch this morning reading a new book of poetry my partner bought for me at the montreal zine fair, called ArcPoetryMagazine.

The rain is beautiful and I wanted to share this lovely little poem from the book-

Old Men, Smoking

Sandra Kasturi

You can see them standing singly or in clusters on street corners

Or sitting, calm a toads, in quaint but seedy coffee bars

These old men who smoke and don't speak English. 

They stare into the distance, seeing the drowning

Of the Titanic, the Lusitania, some obscure Estonian ferry,

Experiencing the wash of history. It leaves them clean,

Weathered, their eyes turned that strangest of blues by the sea,

The wind, the turning of years. These old men who smoke

And don't speak English- they know all the secrets of the universe,

Revealed to them in each glowing ember that flies away

From their mouths into the world. These old men- descendants

Of Prometheus, who, having stolen fire, passed it down through the ages 

To old men who never grow older or die. They are immune

To cancer, to weather, to the voices of women. They simply smoke,

Cast embers into the air, into history, mutter in foreign tongues

No matter what country they are in. These men with their gnarled

Gardeners' hands that never really smile, never really see you,

But you know them, know them from past incarnations,

From memory, from myth. Maybe they do smile, inwardly, secretly,

At our mad scurryings and busy bodies. Such guileless crocodiles!-

Sitting, steadying the tilting world; smoking, obscuring the truths

We cannot bear to know; humming in the voices of God.

http://www.arcpoetry.ca/