Categories
Poetry

Fair and Delightsome

  1. We crawled out of a golden book and spread across the land
  2. And whispered from the dust, they said, secured by angels’s hand.
  3. Were sent to a choice hemisphere, yet from God’s presence banned.
  4. We prospered, fruitful, multiplied, as if like grains of sand.
  5. And then they came to us in pairs to tell us we were lost.
  6. They took our culture, stripped it bare, and nailed it to a cross.
  7. Straightened our souls, split them in two; the rest they burned as dross.
  8. Clothed us in white, arm to the square, into the water tossed.
  9. But we weren’t fast enough for them to leave our savage ways;
  10. They scooped our children from our homes, so they instead could raise,
  11. To fold their arms, and break their bread, baptize them with a blaze,
  12. And bleach their skin to make them fair—delightsome was the phrase.

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By Kim Siever

I live in Lethbridge with my spouse and 5 of our 6 children. I’m a writer, focusing on social issues and the occasional poem. My politics are radically left. I recently finished writing a book debunking several capitalism myths. My newest book writing project is on the labour history of Lethbridge.

I’m also dichotomally Mormon. And I’m a functional vegetarian: I have a blog post about that somewhere around here. My pronouns are he/him.

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