Richard Yves-Sitoski, Poet Laureate of Owen Sound from 2019 to 2023, read this poem at city council on Monday, Apr. 17, in honour of National Poetry Month:

Show Me How You Live

Medicate me with stars

Meet me at the place where rising sun grazes Earth

Pull a diamond from the Coalsack Nebula

Most of all, show me how you live

Convince me a dove is more than a pigeon in a suit

Find me a colour lovelier than green

Teach me humility without humiliation

And show me how you live

Make the Dog Days of summer fetch my slippers

Scrawl in crayon what Aristotle missed

Make me not fear the blank page

Make me not fear the blank mind

Teach me the language of orchids

Show me how you get love from the tar sands of your heart

Show me how you twerk with plutonium in your shoes

Show me how you live

Write me a book more perfect than silence

Please me like the coolness on the other side of the pillow

Define the word “home” using an apple pie

Sky-write a sonnet with fireflies

And show me how you live

Carry my words up to heaven on the smoke of this manuscript 

Quell the cold wind that blows parents apart

Find a cure for adolescence that requires no drugs

Bear me on your shoulders like resentment at injustice

Pin the moon to my chest as a medal for making it this far

Let me spend five minutes as a dog to experience true bliss

Rip this stony tongue from my mouth so I can spit rose petals

But above all, show me how you live

Show me how you live with your halo on blocks in the driveway

Show me how you stare down melancholy till it whimpers

How you swim when life is a lake colder than space

How you cling to love like a rain-soaked sheet

Show me how

Give me all you got 

Give it to me till we run out of air

Give it to me till we run out of numbers or words for beauty

And I swear

I swear my friend

I’ll do the same for you

photo generously shared by Wil McReynolds