It’s not holy if you tell it
to a stranger
on the beach.
It cannot be holy
if it is a story whose telling
has just become habitual,
I met her in the shade,
she wore green,
inclined her head a bit,
we’d gone to the same school
but never met.
It is coarse, it is crude,
it is profane and it does no favours
to the millions who wait
knowing or unknowing
for what is holy,
for what is secret,
for what can be told only in fragments,
reluctantly,
to old drunks and grandmothers
on buses,
barely listening.
~ from Undercurrents, New Voices in Canadian Poetry
edited by Robyn Sarah (Cormorant Books, 2011)
