Sherbourne Morning

(Postcard of Allan Gardens and Sherbourne Street, 1908,
Toronto, Ontario; found at Chuckman Toronto Nostalgia)

“There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and where kindness . . . is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object — we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. . . . It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms; with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes.”

~ C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), English writer of essays, poems, and novels, including The Chronicles of Narnia, from The Problem of Pain

SHERBOURNE¹ MORNING

I begin to understand the old men, parked on benches
smoking a bit of July, waiting for the early
bottle; the large tears of the passers-by, wrapped
in white cotton, the world bandaged at 7 AM;
when the day goes old, they lean over
and nod into their arms, lovers, one-time carriers
of their separate hearts; their wives, their children
are glass partitions through which they see themselves
crying. Love them, or better yet, imagine a world
without a footstool for the creased and lame; imagine how that
sun above them spins halos for angels gone berserk.

~ Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, born 1949, Italian-born Canadian poet, appointed the second poet laureate of Toronto, 2004-2009

¹Sherbourne – a somewhat run-down street in downtown Toronto