05.03.18

Malcolm Lowry Dérive: Canadian writer and teacher, Dorothy Livesay, also lived in a shack along the shores of Dollarton, and on many an occasion befriended the Lowrys, indulged the excesses, endured the onslaught. Malcolm's erratic behavior and overall decline after the publication of Under the Volcano gradually drove many of his friends away. Among the self-exiled was Livesay, a poet with strong socialist roots and a rebel heart. It is worth considering that her sympathies lay more with those fighting outwards and against the oppressive other, rather than those entrenched in bloody self-warfare:

Lorca

And fountains curl their plumes

On statue stone,

In secret thicket mould

Lovers defend their hold

Old couples hearing whisperers

Touch in a handclasp, quivering.

For you sang out aloud

Arching the silent wood

To stretch itself, tiptoe,

Above the crowd…

                  You hold the word

                  Unspoken.

You breathe. You be!

Bare, stripped light

Time’s fragment flagged

Against the dark.

You dance. Explode

Unchallenged through the door

As bullets burst

Long deaths ago, your breast.

And song outsoars

The bomber’s range

Serene with wind-

Maneuvered cloud.

                  Light flight and word

                  The unassailed, the token!

 - Dorothy Livesay, 1941