Poems 2026
Of Time and Rocks and Memory
If I look up into the black sky,
stare at time’s vast expanse.
If I think about my story,
all the years, compressed
into memories so small.
I cannot touch the sky
but with time new images
expand that skyscape.
I have only faded photographs
that will be sediment like my bones.
On my island are three layers,
the 300 to 400 million years of mud,
baked and turned to stone,
tipped on its side,
then on top in some places
230-million-year-old basalt,
huge, pillowed lava
formed beneath the sea
and above that 80-million-year-old
young rock made of sand
and river cobbles, concreted over time.
But that middle layer is mostly missing,
A gap in time, no basalt. It’s missing.
How does 230-million-year-old rock disappear?
Makes me wonder
about my gaps in memory,
how long the sediment
of my photographs
and my bones will last.
No Sense of Each New Year
In apple time I climbed the trees
in abandoned orchards
before the subdivisions came,
no sense of each new year,
but life and light revolving round.
In late summer when it never rained
asphalt gave way to gravel as we
cycled past the crooked apple trees
to swim naked in a river bend
where slow water was always cool and deep.
In autumn the waning sun
burned our skin one last time
among the rustled leaves,
no warning beside the river, cold and black,
caught on a cusp of change.
In the long dead of winter,
we had snow-filled hills to climb
toboggans, frozen soaked clothing,
up and down, up and again
until we could hardly walk,
or ice where the river
had overflowed, we skated
with pucks and sticks
rubber-booted goal posts
for the all-day game,
before trudging home
exhausted with a smile.
Then snowmelt snowball fights
with stones and slush
risk taking out an eye, dangerous stuff
as if the devil inhabited our souls,
but that never lasted long
as the spring sun grew
with robins, blue skies, daffodils,
our warm bodies, thirsting
for those gravel roads,
where the abandoned orchards
trees rich with fruit, ripe for climbing,
no subdivisions on the horizon.
Future Loss
Seems every year someone is gone,
another one of many losses,
some sad, others not so,
but always there is sorrow,
a lingering of a greater grief
because we aren’t immortal
don’t have infinite time
to endure and witness
the far-off future,
one full of promise
surprise and awe.
We’ve got to live and love
what’s in our grasp.
That’s all there is,
a sense of future loss
not for myself,
but of that unknown future
where we could be happy
in our imagined paradise.
That’s Okay
Do you recall the day
my hair caught fire,
and yet, you took me
to the party where we
told stories and listened?
Do you recall the late night
August walks, the hot humidity,
your body a full moon in labour
or how we danced across
the needled forest floor,
or when the baby bird flew the nest
and we were left naked and alone,
and didn’t need to say
we were going for a nap,
and how we giggled and played
together with so much house,
and how we recalled that first night
at the party, talking and listening,
or the pine needles on our bodies,
or the moss and earth joining us together,
and now, how we live and breathe
and sleep in comforting silences,
and how that’s okay,
since perhaps we know all the old stories
and only have the time for daily sound bites
and that’s okay.
David Fraser 2026
Poems 2023 (These poems can be found in Imprints on a Path: Selected and New Poems.)
I Will Be Done with Taming Things
Somewhere in the distance
all will be silent,
but for now, I bend
over cold-winter water
in the pond, down in the weeds,
clearing unwanted growth
and a frog who wasn’t here
last year arrives,
and I discover grubs asleep below.
So absorbed am I
with the earth gripped
in my fingers,
my bent back over soil,
barrows of mulch
to define the grass
from the garden’s edge
into the task, I do not feel
the rain upon my back,
turbulence above me,
then the hail
drumming on the water,
and I continue looking
for closure with each
garden bed I groom,
my mind wandering
through the past
at how things change
and stay the same,
my labour taming things,
molding gardens, bread,
and young people
in my care, how much help
I gave and got along the way.
In the distance,
all will be silent,
the weeds will be gone,
and the small frog will be another,
the rain and hail the same
and I will be done
with taming things.
David Fraser April 3, 2023
You Cannot Hold on to Broken Things
I pass the field waiting for the lambs
and wonder what will happen to them this year?
There are two now huddled close
to their mother beside the fence.
My father gone. My mother after him.
In the cold days of growing up
I had a stuffed monkey that I loved
beside the closet where the rats were kept.
Monkey lost his hair and mother fed up
with sewing up the limbs, threw him out
I rescued him from the garbage many times
but forever lost him when my family packed and left.
I should have known the fate of broken things.
David Fraser April 3, 2023
What Has Happened to the Kissing?
What has happened to the kissing,
afternoons when young lips drank
from each other’s well.
Surprises ambushed by desire, swollen lips
drinking from an endless stream.
What has happened to the kissing,
a step away from a touch,
a brush of lips across the neck,
a turn toward you, to meet again
like dust creating stars.
David Fraser Feb. 2023
Love Poem for Three Generations
The day is over now,
so come away,
as when your nearness
could comfort me.
Remember in the garden
working in the soil,
sun blazing on our faces,
how we felt this place
we created from bare earth
how we fertilized the future
and raised closely and from a distance
those little girls we knew
before they grew, strong enough,
to follow dreams.
David Fraser Jan 2023
Featured Published Poems
When Bone Ships Sailed the Stars
When they approached the cliff
there was no turning back. It’s then
they carved a ship from the hollow bone
of a great sea serpent’s skull,
fashioned sails from its skin
before the creature rotted,
bleached by sun and water by the sea.
With each passing day, with tools
once forged in zero gravity, they worked,
etching runes and circuitry,
the rotting smell enough to make
the starving hurl their stomachs on the rocks.
At night in a cave, on an oak table
they unfolded all the stars in the milky way
and spread them like a map
lit by harnessed sun and candle light.
In them was a spirit not destroyed and they would gather
by the hot tide pools tempered by the sea,
and search late summer skies for answers,
make up stories for the questions that still remained.
Their solar barque was fitted with the tiny bones
of all the animals they loved, fingers from children
who’d died too young, and the long thin shanks
of the wasted ones who once had brought them home
in woven baskets and swaddling clothes.
They drew messages on the polished surface of the hull--
arc of the moon, a rising sun, studded holes punched
into a black night sky. They knew of ghost ships
that could appear out of a foggy night, or from around
a cluster of debris afloat and held in space.
They knew the danger waiting there. They knew
not to listen to the Sirens call that came from deep in time.
There were some who stayed, grounded, and wrote
of ancient floods and arks preserved on mountain tops,
but the carvers knew from beyond those histories,
that those stories were caught up too much with words.
And when they left—a great rising up of oars
and sail to catch the solar winds—with regret
they watched those who could not escape,
watched them fashion stone shapes of great ship hulls
in meadows as a message to draw them back,
watched them paint on rock walls with fingers dipped
in blood and berry juice in flame and shadows, and
watched them with mathematics lay out huge stones
as signs on the desert sand. Regret they knew
for their great bone ship was destined
only for the stars.
David Fraser
Previously published in Tesseracts 18, 2015
Margaret, December 1971
On the snow I hold my arms out wide like the angel above my brother’s crib. Mr. Harris will be mad at me when he knows I’m missing from his class. He’ll call my mom and she’ll be mad at me, and we’re moving on the weekend; Uncle Bobby’s helping us. When Mr. Harris finds me in the snow, I’ll tell him how last night I held my baby brother, how blue he was, how quiet, like my doll with her missing arm, how I didn’t tell my mom ‘cause she was busy with Uncle Bobby, banging the bed against the wall. I won’t tell him how I carried my baby brother with me to the school, how I made angels for him in the snow, how I made a crib and tucked him in behind the bushes by the steps and made more angels to keep him safe. They thought he was a doll. I won’t tell Mr. Harris how each night I want, not to cry, just stay warm, like my baby brother now, wrapped up in his bed beneath the snow.
David Fraser
Previously published in After All the Scissor Work Is Done, A collection published by Leaf Press Spring 2016
The Bogeyman an We Never Knew
When they found him,
he’d been dead for many weeks,
feet propped up in a La-Z-Boy,™
head back, mouth a grin,
bare-chested with curled grey hair
on pale white flesh,
just in his underwear,
yellowed jockeys, elastic graphed
into his skin, scattered centre-folds
of porn, upon his lap,
crusted, dried ejaculate
caught in the creases
where the naked breasts of strange
women came to visit him.
We always wondered what he did
inside that house. In the early morning
he would sit on his veranda steps, or
late at night, there in the shadows
watching everyone pass by.
He slept on a walnut dining table
with a pillow and a sheet,
heat lamp suspended from the ceiling
where a chandelier had hung.
We often wondered how old he was
behind that beard, those squinting eyes,
that silent mouth that coughed up
phlegm and horked it into the Spiraea
on each side of his veranda steps.
We often wondered about his loneliness
and never once imagined how,
in the creases of his mind
he’d preyed on some
with backpacks, books and skipping ropes,
short summer dresses in May and June,
and even on the rainy days of fall,
and the bundled-up late afternoons
when winter stalked the streets.
We just never knew, and that’s what,
when we found him, scared us most.
David Fraser
Previously published in After All the Scissor Work Is Done: A collection published by Leaf Press Spring 2016
Of Time and Rocks and Memory
If I look up into the black sky,
stare at time’s vast expanse.
If I think about my story,
all the years, compressed
into memories so small.
I cannot touch the sky
but with time new images
expand that skyscape.
I have only faded photographs
that will be sediment like my bones.
On my island are three layers,
the 300 to 400 million years of mud,
baked and turned to stone,
tipped on its side,
then on top in some places
230-million-year-old basalt,
huge, pillowed lava
formed beneath the sea
and above that 80-million-year-old
young rock made of sand
and river cobbles, concreted over time.
But that middle layer is mostly missing,
A gap in time, no basalt. It’s missing.
How does 230-million-year-old rock disappear?
Makes me wonder
about my gaps in memory,
how long the sediment
of my photographs
and my bones will last.
No Sense of Each New Year
In apple time I climbed the trees
in abandoned orchards
before the subdivisions came,
no sense of each new year,
but life and light revolving round.
In late summer when it never rained
asphalt gave way to gravel as we
cycled past the crooked apple trees
to swim naked in a river bend
where slow water was always cool and deep.
In autumn the waning sun
burned our skin one last time
among the rustled leaves,
no warning beside the river, cold and black,
caught on a cusp of change.
In the long dead of winter,
we had snow-filled hills to climb
toboggans, frozen soaked clothing,
up and down, up and again
until we could hardly walk,
or ice where the river
had overflowed, we skated
with pucks and sticks
rubber-booted goal posts
for the all-day game,
before trudging home
exhausted with a smile.
Then snowmelt snowball fights
with stones and slush
risk taking out an eye, dangerous stuff
as if the devil inhabited our souls,
but that never lasted long
as the spring sun grew
with robins, blue skies, daffodils,
our warm bodies, thirsting
for those gravel roads,
where the abandoned orchards
trees rich with fruit, ripe for climbing,
no subdivisions on the horizon.
Future Loss
Seems every year someone is gone,
another one of many losses,
some sad, others not so,
but always there is sorrow,
a lingering of a greater grief
because we aren’t immortal
don’t have infinite time
to endure and witness
the far-off future,
one full of promise
surprise and awe.
We’ve got to live and love
what’s in our grasp.
That’s all there is,
a sense of future loss
not for myself,
but of that unknown future
where we could be happy
in our imagined paradise.
That’s Okay
Do you recall the day
my hair caught fire,
and yet, you took me
to the party where we
told stories and listened?
Do you recall the late night
August walks, the hot humidity,
your body a full moon in labour
or how we danced across
the needled forest floor,
or when the baby bird flew the nest
and we were left naked and alone,
and didn’t need to say
we were going for a nap,
and how we giggled and played
together with so much house,
and how we recalled that first night
at the party, talking and listening,
or the pine needles on our bodies,
or the moss and earth joining us together,
and now, how we live and breathe
and sleep in comforting silences,
and how that’s okay,
since perhaps we know all the old stories
and only have the time for daily sound bites
and that’s okay.
David Fraser 2026
Poems 2023 (These poems can be found in Imprints on a Path: Selected and New Poems.)
I Will Be Done with Taming Things
Somewhere in the distance
all will be silent,
but for now, I bend
over cold-winter water
in the pond, down in the weeds,
clearing unwanted growth
and a frog who wasn’t here
last year arrives,
and I discover grubs asleep below.
So absorbed am I
with the earth gripped
in my fingers,
my bent back over soil,
barrows of mulch
to define the grass
from the garden’s edge
into the task, I do not feel
the rain upon my back,
turbulence above me,
then the hail
drumming on the water,
and I continue looking
for closure with each
garden bed I groom,
my mind wandering
through the past
at how things change
and stay the same,
my labour taming things,
molding gardens, bread,
and young people
in my care, how much help
I gave and got along the way.
In the distance,
all will be silent,
the weeds will be gone,
and the small frog will be another,
the rain and hail the same
and I will be done
with taming things.
David Fraser April 3, 2023
You Cannot Hold on to Broken Things
I pass the field waiting for the lambs
and wonder what will happen to them this year?
There are two now huddled close
to their mother beside the fence.
My father gone. My mother after him.
In the cold days of growing up
I had a stuffed monkey that I loved
beside the closet where the rats were kept.
Monkey lost his hair and mother fed up
with sewing up the limbs, threw him out
I rescued him from the garbage many times
but forever lost him when my family packed and left.
I should have known the fate of broken things.
David Fraser April 3, 2023
What Has Happened to the Kissing?
What has happened to the kissing,
afternoons when young lips drank
from each other’s well.
Surprises ambushed by desire, swollen lips
drinking from an endless stream.
What has happened to the kissing,
a step away from a touch,
a brush of lips across the neck,
a turn toward you, to meet again
like dust creating stars.
David Fraser Feb. 2023
Love Poem for Three Generations
The day is over now,
so come away,
as when your nearness
could comfort me.
Remember in the garden
working in the soil,
sun blazing on our faces,
how we felt this place
we created from bare earth
how we fertilized the future
and raised closely and from a distance
those little girls we knew
before they grew, strong enough,
to follow dreams.
David Fraser Jan 2023
Featured Published Poems
When Bone Ships Sailed the Stars
When they approached the cliff
there was no turning back. It’s then
they carved a ship from the hollow bone
of a great sea serpent’s skull,
fashioned sails from its skin
before the creature rotted,
bleached by sun and water by the sea.
With each passing day, with tools
once forged in zero gravity, they worked,
etching runes and circuitry,
the rotting smell enough to make
the starving hurl their stomachs on the rocks.
At night in a cave, on an oak table
they unfolded all the stars in the milky way
and spread them like a map
lit by harnessed sun and candle light.
In them was a spirit not destroyed and they would gather
by the hot tide pools tempered by the sea,
and search late summer skies for answers,
make up stories for the questions that still remained.
Their solar barque was fitted with the tiny bones
of all the animals they loved, fingers from children
who’d died too young, and the long thin shanks
of the wasted ones who once had brought them home
in woven baskets and swaddling clothes.
They drew messages on the polished surface of the hull--
arc of the moon, a rising sun, studded holes punched
into a black night sky. They knew of ghost ships
that could appear out of a foggy night, or from around
a cluster of debris afloat and held in space.
They knew the danger waiting there. They knew
not to listen to the Sirens call that came from deep in time.
There were some who stayed, grounded, and wrote
of ancient floods and arks preserved on mountain tops,
but the carvers knew from beyond those histories,
that those stories were caught up too much with words.
And when they left—a great rising up of oars
and sail to catch the solar winds—with regret
they watched those who could not escape,
watched them fashion stone shapes of great ship hulls
in meadows as a message to draw them back,
watched them paint on rock walls with fingers dipped
in blood and berry juice in flame and shadows, and
watched them with mathematics lay out huge stones
as signs on the desert sand. Regret they knew
for their great bone ship was destined
only for the stars.
David Fraser
Previously published in Tesseracts 18, 2015
Margaret, December 1971
On the snow I hold my arms out wide like the angel above my brother’s crib. Mr. Harris will be mad at me when he knows I’m missing from his class. He’ll call my mom and she’ll be mad at me, and we’re moving on the weekend; Uncle Bobby’s helping us. When Mr. Harris finds me in the snow, I’ll tell him how last night I held my baby brother, how blue he was, how quiet, like my doll with her missing arm, how I didn’t tell my mom ‘cause she was busy with Uncle Bobby, banging the bed against the wall. I won’t tell him how I carried my baby brother with me to the school, how I made angels for him in the snow, how I made a crib and tucked him in behind the bushes by the steps and made more angels to keep him safe. They thought he was a doll. I won’t tell Mr. Harris how each night I want, not to cry, just stay warm, like my baby brother now, wrapped up in his bed beneath the snow.
David Fraser
Previously published in After All the Scissor Work Is Done, A collection published by Leaf Press Spring 2016
The Bogeyman an We Never Knew
When they found him,
he’d been dead for many weeks,
feet propped up in a La-Z-Boy,™
head back, mouth a grin,
bare-chested with curled grey hair
on pale white flesh,
just in his underwear,
yellowed jockeys, elastic graphed
into his skin, scattered centre-folds
of porn, upon his lap,
crusted, dried ejaculate
caught in the creases
where the naked breasts of strange
women came to visit him.
We always wondered what he did
inside that house. In the early morning
he would sit on his veranda steps, or
late at night, there in the shadows
watching everyone pass by.
He slept on a walnut dining table
with a pillow and a sheet,
heat lamp suspended from the ceiling
where a chandelier had hung.
We often wondered how old he was
behind that beard, those squinting eyes,
that silent mouth that coughed up
phlegm and horked it into the Spiraea
on each side of his veranda steps.
We often wondered about his loneliness
and never once imagined how,
in the creases of his mind
he’d preyed on some
with backpacks, books and skipping ropes,
short summer dresses in May and June,
and even on the rainy days of fall,
and the bundled-up late afternoons
when winter stalked the streets.
We just never knew, and that’s what,
when we found him, scared us most.
David Fraser
Previously published in After All the Scissor Work Is Done: A collection published by Leaf Press Spring 2016