Heading into what promises to be a complex year, we asked contributor Angela Long, who is also a poet, to write a poem to share with our readers as a way of putting a bow on our 2024 publishing. We love how she worked in voices from the interviews she’s done for us over the last few years.
I think poetry and journalism have a lot in common – both attempt to distill the complex into something more understandable – but a poem is often about capturing a personal moment, an emotion, and may leave its writer in a position of vulnerability rather than protected by their title of “journalist.” —Angela Long
Off the record
Press record. The words begin.
The who, the what, the where.
The how you slept in your car one winter’s night,
to see how it feels,
the why if your phone rings after midnight,
you answer.
(my rest is when I help people, actually)
And I learn your language,
from the DQs to the RJOs,
from the non-restrictive funding to the non-qualified donee.
You teach me hiy hiy and netukulimk, and that colonialism
is not a word, it’s a woman
walking across the country in a red dress.
A dog barks in your East Van backyard.
A polar vortex shakes the windows of your cabin.
A houseplant, a gift from your mother, frames your face.
(they are not just doing their jobs, they’re saving lives)
And I take notes, distilling word after word
into story after story, sounding
the depths of our suffering, straddling
the widths of our inequities, teetering
at the precipice of hope. You tell me
you’ve seen the power of a life transformed,
as simple as a light flicked back on, illuminating
the way. And on these dark days,
the darkest of days,
(until all of us have made it, none of us have made it)
I enter the forest
where rosehips glisten like precious gems,
and snowberries dot the understory like lanterns,
and I think of you.
I rest my palm on the bark of a cedar,
its stories, hundreds of years old,
humming in the cambium,
told in a lacework of fronds
rising beyond sight,
to be read by the rising moon,
and the flocks of geese
winging their way towards the light.
Listen to Angela read her poem:
