A poem I wrote about Lethbridge based on the opening soliloquy from Richard III. It won an honourable mention at the 2014 Dr. William Henry Drummond Poetry Contest.
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious spring by the flattened, sodden grass;
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious spring by the flattened, sodden grass;
And all stiff grit lour’d
upon our house
In the deep bosom of the
Old Man buried.
Now are our brows bound by
snapback John Deere caps;
Our itchy, irritated skin
lotioned with Vaseline Intensive Care;
Our walkways shoveled
bare,
Our dreadful spinning
tires altered to traction on asphalt.
Absurdly beaming
missionaries hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting
snow blower
To fright the souls of neighborhood
cats,
He capers nimbly in Tim
Hortons
To the delectable scent of
almost burnt coffee.
But I, that am not shaped
for sportive trucks,
Nor made to castrate amorous
cattle;
I, that am rude and stamp my chukka boots upon the floor
And strut before
independent coffeehouse;
I, that am curtail’d of
broad feedlot cowboy shoulders,
Cheated of muscled ass
that properly fits Wranglers,
Delicate, finish’d, dainty
and sent
Into this honky-tonk
world, properly made up,
And so perfectly
fashionable
That coyotes yip at me as
I halt by them;
Why, I, in this manly city
of truck nuts,
Have no delight to pass
away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in
the glazed coffee shop window
And descant on my own
trimmed-bread-hipster handsomeness:
And therefore,
since I cannot prove a calloused worker,
To entertain these Conservatives,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the lack of idle pleasures to
be found these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and
dreams,
To set the Evangelical and the Mormons
In deadly hate one against the other:
And if manly-men be as coarse and lumbering
As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,
This day should the righteous be
exposed,
And their sheepish self-serving
piousness revealed.
Dive,
thoughts: here come the missionaries.
© 2014, Leila Armstrong
