"Collections From A Forest" is the first eBook volume from a growing anthology of poetry by Charles Van Gorkom that thoughtfully challenge, probe, and question some of the deepest assumptions of our race. They are poems bridging the expressable and wordlessly remote. Many are poems immersed in beauty and light found everywhere in our human experience. One can't read "Collections From A Forest" for long without sensing a universe of unfathomed love and flowing fountains of hope.

Poets Prayer

Let my words
Eddy ebb and flow
With currents of tribal sea,
Streams of light,
Threads of blood.

Let them be marbles
In the canyon's teeth,
Rolling in the mouth
Of swollen flume.

Let them fall with rattle
And battle roar,
Unharnessed tides
Surging after the moon,

At war with all
But the canoe
Threading upstream
Between skirmish
And silver beam,
Paddled strong-shouldered
Where river churns
By Desire and his lover
Gentle Dream.

Til an island
Where tall pines
Shelter a cabin

In whose window warmly
An oil lamp in darkness
Burns.

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Drawing A Poem

Something stirs in you,
Grab the pen and open the sketchbook,
Glance intensely at life,
Then back to the blank page.

Life, the page and back,
Your eyes flying,
See life emerging from the page,
Set your hand in motion,
Sketching the air,
Your mind filling with the stirring,
Feeling the shapes of what you see,
Then skimming, landing on the white field,
Words running.

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A Concert For Two Hands

I

Send words, I Am,
Skipping across blue waves,
Send them shining, I Am,
Through stain-glass parables,
Colored crystaline analogies
Uphill to the nest beneath the steeple
Where Sabbath bells wait
To sound the hour,
Incubate flesh long dead
To music.

Send words that sillouette
Mysteries and draw them
From timeless shadow,
Fleshless grave.

Send words that clothe them
In gospel,
Preach them to gathered
Field birds and passers by,
Change the forest,
Change the world,
Make a way for rivers
Between stones,
Open mouths of earth,
Let long closed caverns
Resonate with song,

Perhaps a man somewhere may hear
And turning to I Am
Be forever glad.

II

We are caught in the pronunciation
Of your single word,
Silencing our torrented storm.

Echoeless opus unfinished,
In progress,
A roaring wind,
A whisper
In which even questions
Are silenced;
A lullaby,
A call to war,
A song of love,
A pouring of the sea
Into a well,
Endless as wind with no beginning.

All our efforts repeat
The fragments we comprehend
And mark us to one another
As friend
As we compare and fit our torn slips
From one great manuscript
Unfolding as love.

Charles Van Gorkom hand-crafts his poems the same way he hand makes his internationally acclaimed hiking boots: with love in a universe he sees not of random chaos, but dimly comprehended fractals of love. Most of the poems in "Collections From A Forest Volume 1" have appeared elsewhere either in print or online, some have won awards. Charles Van Gorkom, who has also taught school, written, composed, and performed for northern CBC television, also spent 43 years in and around the great remote and isolated wildernesses of Northern British Columbia. He makes shoes and writes still today in the kinder climate of Vancouver Island.