FRANZ*
November 26
The biopics on Kafka keep coming,
though the mystery remains
how this employee of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute
who could negotiate bureaucratic hurdles without difficulty
came to record the stranglehold of bureaucracy
over people’s lives,
spawning in the process
a potent adjective out of his own name;
who suffering from writer’s block
as few others experience,
left a literary heritage
only the rarest of writers can claim;
who could never maintain a lasting relationship
with members of the opposite sex,
dying largely unknown at forty of TB,
yet something of a cult figure
in our day and age,
tourists flocking to the Prague museum
that bears his name;
a mystery all said and done
that would have left the K. of his novels
perplexed by the fame
antiheroes posthumously attain.
*Franz, a biopic directed by Agnieszka Holland
HAS CANADA COME OF AGE?
January 3
In the aftermath of WWI,
with the sacrifices at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele,
and our membership in the newborn League,
some argued Canada was coming of age.
In the aftermath of WWII,
as we shed the symbols of Empire
– British subjects, Dominion status,
Union Jack on the flag –
we seemed to be fully on track.
All the more with our economy booming,
a robust welfare state,
Expo 67, a newfound cultural buzz,
a Charter entrenching basic rights.
Free trade may have locked us
into the American orbit,
but we acceded to G7 rank,
stayed out of the Iraq War,
much like the Vietnam War before it,
and survived two Quebec sovereignty referenda
along the way.
With the ogre now strutting about
we’ve adopted elbows up,
determined to fend our own course,
with appropriate allies to boot,
in a global order being ripped apart
by Russia and the U.S. alike.
Yet lingering existentialist angst
still leaves one to doubt
just what this northern home of ours
is all about.
First Nations tug at our ancestral strings,
our two key linguistic communities
all too superficially overlap,
regional divisions repeatedly flare up,
and the conundrum remains unresolved.
Without a deeper sense of shared identity,
this side of temporal possibility,
can one credibly maintain
that Canada has finally come of age?
HOW MUCH WOULD CANADIANS PAY?
January 14
Even as the world media’s attention
remains focused on Venezuela,
Greenland, or Iran,
Ukraine continues to be battered,
its electricity networks repeatedly destroyed,
as the winter cold creeps in.
Yet its population,
robbed of so many of its children,
of big chunks of its territory,
struggles on,
unwilling to yield
its precious freedom as a country
to Putin’s folly.
How much would Canadians
be prepared to pay,
and not just in terms of GDP,
to keep our side of the 49th parallel intact
from a marauding neighbour?
FENTANYL ALLEY, 10 P.M.
March 7
Why are they so
bent over on the pavement,
crouching with knees
up against their chin,
rain beating down
as though there were no tomorrow,
no shelter, this night of nights,
to take them in?
Was it a broken family,
a short-lived job or marriage,
a friendship that spelled disaster,
one drink too many,
neurons that misfired,
ecstasy and fentanyl
the body could not absorb?
No going back,
no going forward,
the entrails of a First World city
on display,
this nightly tragedy
a stark reminder
of where even lucky countries
can go astray.
DAVOS MAN – 1
March 14
A speech resonating far and wide,
shoring up middling countries of the globe
against the overweening power
of the strong.
But our smooth-talking PM
has other accoutrements of Davos man,
thirteen years in the employ of Goldman Sachs,
five as vice-chair of Brookfield Asset Management,
funds bolstering the planet’s wealthy one per cent.
The one role may complement the other,
many might believe,
but sceptics have every right to wonder
which version of Davos man
is ultimately more likely to prevail.
CAPITALISM*
March 29
Of the “ism”s that have graced the earth,
this one has had a venerable run,
a good five hundred years to date,
still going strong.
One that’s taken many twists and turns,
bringing extraordinary wealth to some,
crushing servitude to many more,
impressive breakthroughs in how we moderns live
and the cornucopia of things we now consume,
but at a price the planet has begin to reap.
It fuses easily with other ideologies,
liberalism, conservatism, social democracy,
authoritarianism of the fascistic,
military, or theocratic stripe,
and as we’ve come to see,
even with communist heterodoxy.
What its future destiny foretells
is impossible to predict,
but given how empires have come and gone,
states, religions, and creeds of every sort,
this version of an earthly god
is unlikely to escape their fate.
*Sven Beckert, Capitalism: A Global History
THE APRIL OF OUR DISCONTENT
April 1
Chaucer spoke of April
with its sweet-smelling showers
piercing the draught of March
to the root;
Eliot dubbed April the cruellest month,
breeding lilacs out of the dead land.
And what are we to make
of April as it rolls around,
a full-scale war on in the Middle East,
another still raging to its north,
with little reason to believe
that springtime heralds the Prince of Peace?
The earth will be renewed, no doubt,
but even that is less assured
as the climate takes repeated hits,
and an ambient sense of gloom
pervades no small portion
of our terrestial habitat.
So here’s to the April of our discontent.
DEATH FUGUE
April 25
The wiggle room to end the current strife
is as narrow as the Strait itself,
with the prospect of lasting peace as fragile
as magnolia petals falling from the trees,
with language usage more tortured and debased
than the currency of medieval kings,
and the spiral of shattered lives
a horror film with no semblance of relief,
even if many hope and pray
that the rival madmen in command
and their contending creeds
will somehow release us from their iron grip
and from a death fugue
fast becoming the symbol of a dystopian age.
THE FUNDAMENTALIST IMPERATIVE
April 29
Secular minded souls
may well have thought
the very notion of God
had bitten the dust
a century or two ago,
that science pushing the frontiers
of the cosmos
had revealed a universe so expansive
no god could ever call it home.
Yet there seems to be a turn
to more intransigent forms of faith,
in each of the Abrahamic religions
for all their historic rivalry,
in Hinduism or Buddhism as well,
no more immune from extremism’s siren call.
In an era
when civic institutions and secular creeds
once taken for granted
begin to fray
and chaos rears its head,
the fundamentalist imperative
can provide unequivocal certainty in its stead.
LEARNING TO LIVE WITH AMBIGUITY
May 25
Every generation, it seems, believes it inhabits uniquely turbulent times.
— Hannah Critchlow, The 21st Century Brain
We’re learning,
as our twilight years sink in,
that the waves that buffeted us in one direction
can just as quickly turn the other way,
the comfort zone we knew as peace
can quickly turn to war,
the nature we thought that we had tamed
can punch right back,
and all our breakthroughs in technology
have failed to revamp our hard-wired brains.
So rather than mourn our vanished certainties
or curse the times in which we live,
we’d best embrace the ambiguities
that make us the beings who we are.
DAVOS MAN – 2
May 29
“A strong Canada will help make America great again,” Carney tells New York business leaders.
— CBC News, May 28, 2026
It was one thing to talk about rupture,
speaking truth to power,
the hypocrisy too often practised by the West,
the need for middle powers to uphold the norms
of a rules-based world order violated by the strong.
But when Davos man
begins to spout the very lines
that have filled the bloated sails
of our less than friendly neighbour
with bombast and disdain
one has cause to wonder.
Are we back to playing junior partner
to a swaggering power that worships manifest destiny,
thinking we will gain by flattery
a few more crumbs from an imperial table
with a mad Caesar at the helm?
Is this the bold new course
the banker cum growth fund manager turned Prime Minister
has ultimately embraced,
the speech a value-free AI bot might generate,
varying with the audience one seeks to ingratiate?
