1. A family legend:
my great-uncle Johnny
came back from the Klondike
diamond-fingered,
pearl-pinned,
gold in all his teeth.
He never put hand to shovel,
or panned a stream:
he opened barber shops.
2. Eliza McCain,
height five foot one,
when the government ordered striking coal miners
and everyone else) off the streets of Nanaimo,
threatened to thrash a six-foot militiaman
with her umbrella
or, if he still stood,
to go home for her husband's horsewhip;
until the poor fellow,
fumbling his hat and rehearsing
alternative explanations for his superior,
let her pass
with shopping list triumphant.
Unfortunately, the stores were closed.
3. In 1945, in Japan,
walking alone,
Private O'Day
came to a hillside temple,
saw in its delicate carvings
swastikas twining around the door;
smashed, with rifle and rock and muscle
(stone chipping, lacquered wood splintering,
gut-lovely sounds of destruction);
till with the return of breath
and binocular vision
he saw the symbol
as it was really
old so old
so much older than the thing he hated
http://www.bookrags.com/biography/pat-lowther-dlb/
