SageGreenJournal.org
voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary
two poems by Brandon McQuade
Brandon McQuade
Cheyenne, Wyoming
Brandon is a Canadian poet who recently moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming. His poems have been published in a number of literary magazines in Ireland, the United States and Canada. He is currently the poetry editor at
Montreal Writes, a literary magazine out of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
New Zealand
The waist deep field of tangled green—
moss, grass, shrubs and weeds
opened to a large clearing
like a battlefield, a scene
from Lord of the Rings.
If you ventured, as a child,
beyond the camp and over the hill,
to the end of the beaten path
in our two-acre backyard
you would be standing, not here,
but in some distant, enchanted forest,
surrounded by giant birch and cypress
straddling the remote frontier,
measuring the untamed beauty—
the forest opening like a black hole
to the rolling green and cavernous fjords,
yourself gone, expired in time and space,
vanished in thin air, in this new wilderness.
West
The furthest east I’ve ever been
is Dublin, Ireland.
And ever since I left,
it seems I’ve been travelling west.