REMEMBERING BATTERY
by Margaret Stewart
1.
Writing from the deck of the cattle boat
He took to England
Michael sent letters
Postcards came from the Tate
A girl in blue by Rosetti
Hair parted in the middle
A blonde like me, in blue.
He loved me, he said.
But I remembered the violence and the fear
And I stayed silent,
Hidden in Calgary,
Breathing the pristine prairie air,
Alive.
2.
Michael drove across Canada
In that red Volkswagen.
Looking for me.
The same little red car he drove, one night,
To some field north of Uxbridge,
Off the Ninth Concession
Where he planned to kill me.
I talked him out of it, I assume,
By making him believe that I loved him,
Forty years later I realize that I was to die that night.
I had bought a ticket on CPR’s The Canadian.
Got off at Calgary with $75.00
And my life. A bargain.
He passed by Calgary in the red car
To look for me in Vancouver
The place where all artsy-craftsy girls flee.
He stood on the corner of Georgia and Granville,
Sure that I would come by on my lunch hour
(he’d found me that way many times before)
But I was hiding in Calgary
Performing in plays,
Meeting ordinary people,
Hoping to learn to live
Hoping just to live.
So, how odd it is to be grieving him
This day, November 30, 2003.
I have outlived him.
And it’s hard to say which one of us
I grieve for the most.
Margaret McIntyre Stewart’s first poetry was published by The Fiddlehead, in 1964. While her daughter was a toddler, writing had to be squeezed in between playtime and the dayjob and, in 1972, Margaret produced a national radio show for the CBC, and a budget cookbook. She even wrote for Flash Confidential in those days, interviewing the girls at "Le Strip", for a feature on Toronto’s first strip club. Margaret wrote and hosted radio and television shows following a move to the West Coast of Canada in 1974. She was a radio pioneer of a sort, becoming the first female DJ to have her own morning show on Vancouver Island. Her book, "Radio Ladies", c.2003, profiles 30 women pioneers in radio broadcasting from 1925 to 1975. The book has been requested by the Canadian Museum of Radio Broadcasting, and the Royal Provincial British Columbia Museum, for their collections. Margaret Stewart holds a degree in English Literature from Simon Fraser University. She is working on a book of poetry - "Magnetewan Suite". The Magnetewan River runs through the bleak, worn-down granite mountains of Northern Ontario. The power and beauty of the river and the northland has sustained this writer all through her life. She now lives in Vancouver.
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