Collections From A Forest, Volume II is a continuation of Volume I. A collection of poems by Charles Van Gorkom, Canadian Poet, that thoughtfully challenge, probe and question some of the deepest held assumptions of our race. Poems bridging the expressable and wordlessly remote. Word pictures immersed in beauty and light found everywhere in our experience. One can't read for long without sensing a universe of unfathomable love and boundless hope.

Write Something Beautiful, She Said

Write how the red fox shines
Standing on the river bank in the morning sun
Luscious in fur against late winter’s
Granular snow and bitter wind.

Write about the water wheel
Broken at the old mill
Frozen in ice
Wooden flume empty
But for last year’s golden poplar
And red maple leaves
Pasted at constellated intervals
By melting snow and wind
On black winter-soaked wood.
Yes, nearby a brook surely mumbles
To herself in sluice-water dreams
Under ice.

A solitary junco flits twig to twig
Syncopated peeping in the underbrush.

Write about how far away
Sun-sails floated by windmills
Slowly turn
Cast cross-shadows East,
Distant bicycles crawl home
Along windy canals
Past fields where tulips blow
And cattle low.

Write about how
Somewhere sure as the setting red sun
A condo tower is built by One
That convulsions of planet
Or malevolent beast
Can never topple down
Nor fire burn,
Safe for home and bed.

Something beautiful, she said.


Upon This Rock

Hard bones rise from edges of the sea,
Slippery descending walls of stone,
Smooth, rounded, grooved
Refuge for tenacious life,

Underestimated by iron hulls
Wrecked upon them,
By waves of centuries
Smashed upon them,
They rise, skeleton of the world
At low tide.

Not cultures, nor cities
In all their fine millenia
Sail through them undestroyed.

What countless waves,
Scouring sand,
Wear of weakness away,
Leave sculpted bones
Skeleton of one unchanging,
Original word.


Web 101

A poetry website,
Entirely of words,
A black screen,
No pictures, just white letters,

Words like headstones
On black lawn,
Or words seared
Through black-out paper
Over windows
That even the enemy can read by
Or see us intimately there
Through the smoking runes.

This the proper use of the web,
Poetry in the babble
Of every language,
Words hammered into lines
Serving hidden agendas of love,
Words twisted from the machine
Spun into garments
Of flattering splendor,
Let come what may,
Or what flag flies.

Charles Van Gorkom, author of "Road To Emmaus" and "Ordinary Exile" handcrafts his poems the same way he handmakes his internationally acclaimed hiking boots: with love in a universe he sees is not of random chaos, but dimly comprehended fractals of love. Charles Van Gorkom Spent 43 years in and around the great remote and isolated wildernesses of Northern British Columbia along the Bulkley River. He has always lived from the output of his head, heart and hands.