draft resister/watching the ducks/fly south

draft resister
watching the ducks
fly south


It's a late duck season this year, and likely global warming is the culprit. Chase and I hiked the more open trails around the hamlet of Malone a few days ago, as it is also bow hunting season for deer, and we didn't want to risk aggravating a camouflaged hunter hiding in his blind.

Shotgun blasts punctuated our walk, and Chase and I accidentally flushed a honking flock of Canada geese off the Upper Moira River.


The shotgun blasts and the flocks of high flying migratory birds remind me annually of the choice I made over 40 years ago to avoid the Vietnam War.  My mother will be 89 at the start of January, 2012, and I haven't seen her in over a decade. With 9/11 paranoia at the U.S. border, likely I'll never see my mother alive again, and I'll have to reserve honouring her death until I bury her with her parents in St. John's Anglican Church in Ancaster, Ontario.


Chris Faiers/cricket



credits:
"Prize", The International Haiku Contest booklet, 1987, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Modern Haiku Association, Tokyo, Japan

Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era, Allan Briesmaster and Michael Berzensky, editors, Seraphim Editions, 2008

ZenRiver: poems & haibun, Hidden Brook Press, 2008

Building Sanctuary: The Movement to Support Vietnam War Resisters in Canada, 1965 - 73, Jessica Squires, UBC Press, 2013