Born in the farming community of Castor, Alberta, Rosemary Griebel grew up on the prairies. There she experienced nature as both immense and intimate. It’s common to say that there is little room to romanticize nature when the lives and deaths of animals are commonplace and all around you. Yet Rosemary, currently Special Projects Manager with the Calgary Public Library, where she has worked for 20 years, always knew experience as both something to be felt and something to be spoken of. Rosemary’s poems have been published on CBC’s radio program Anthology, in national journals, in the Calgary Transit’s “Poetry in Motion” series of in-vehicle posters, and in chapbooks by Leaf Press. In the past two years, her poems have won FreeFall magazine’s national poetry contest three times – in the second year of the contest, two of her poems, unknown to the judges to be by the same author, tied for first place.

Insomnia

You may have heard this before -- an ancient Egyptian
meditation called quiet ears can cure insomnia.
You plug the ear canals with your thumbs
and listen for a high pitched singing in your head.
If you give yourself over to it, the sound will carry you
            into sleep.

                        Outside, the moon is yawning over the city --
and the neighbour has arrived home. He opens a square of light
            to the night.

My husband moves in his sleep,
pulls the blanket to his shoulders. He is curled up,
his ear pressed toward dreams. Now I understand how lovers
fly around each other night and day -- how close and secret
            are the passages of love.

Apparently that melodic sound
is always in the head -- we just need to listen.
The way birds hear a choir of light, and in darkness
            start to sing.

Across the river, wolves in the zoo are howling.
You may have heard this too --
imprisoned animals cry out for their kind, knowing
they are out there somewhere. All creatures
have an instinctive geography that goes beyond fences and cities.
 It is a map of belonging.

Even my own father would call out to my mother in the night.
He could hear her walking above him in heaven,
opening doors, looking for him.

Right now the wolves are hearing things their keepers can not --
the sound of jazz bars closing, the clock-tick
and night noises of humans: distressed crying, love making,
            and someone at a small window writing the world
while a distant keening in her head will not lead her back
to sleep.

It is 3 a.m. I would like to wake my love so we could talk,
or lay our heads together like heavy hymn books, and listen.