The Envoy #114 – The official newsletter of the CCLA – Canada Cuba Literary All

THE ENVOY The official newsletter of the

Canada Cuba Literary Alliance I.S.S.N. – 1911‐0693

September 2021

Issue 114

www.CanadaCubaLiteraryAlliance.org

Photo by Hector Silva Esquivel

Page 1

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

Brief bio Chad Norman lives beside the high-tides of the Bay of Fundy, Truro, Nova Scotia.

He has given talks and readings in Denmark, Sweden, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, America, and across Canada.

His poems appear in publications around the world and have been translated into Danish, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Polish.

His collections are Selected & New Poems (Mosaic Press), and Squall: Poems In The Voice Of Mary Shelley, is out from Guernica Editions. And Simona: A Celebration of the S.P.C.A. will be out early 2021 from Cyberwit.Net (India).

A JESUS FOR THE TAKING

By Chad Norman He is what He says others are... when after a prayer a voice arrives in the wind in the forest small and parental, as well as other sounds of guidance found when the trees share their creaking, all this a presence while a baby raven shows the redness inside his or her beak on a branch just above us.

He says He is what others are...

Page 2

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

in a particular way unintentionally seeking a spot to sit where the sun finds a way through waving new leaves.

A SUCCESSFUL EYE-EXAM

By Chad Norman The lives of a few local trees stand out due to no movement of musical leaves, the shapes of barren branches among those illness hasn't chosen.

THE MEANING OF AMAZEMENT

By Chad Norman I witness a return, the miracle happens: actual honey-bees are really back!

The first of the flowers imitate the sun.

Drops of rain in the ear, morsels of eventual understanding.

Page 3

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

THE NUT AND THE BOLT, 2021

By Chad Norman For Ernest Asante

At work in the endless warehouse another new job taken on, the widest broom in hand, comfortable dust on floors between the storied walls where it is my job to sweep up what's been left by the workers who were told their jobs are over.

I feel them, their families, their losses everywhere in the talkative air, product they gave to long gone taken from their town's economy, all of them left to handle such a shock, removal of an income, all the promises money can make.

As each push begins to form a line all of it what the bristles find in both cracks and smooth sections, a line appearing more and more made up of broken concrete, old tape once placed to designate walkways, dirt left by fork-truck trips, empty pop-cans, lengths of banding used to hold a variety of full pallets together, and unbelievably in a spot easily unseen a shiny unused nut, there alone, causing me to believe it was forgotten.

I rest the broom against a railing part of a protective guard, painted yellow over the years, go down on one knee to pick it up, and stop the hand holding it to make a decision about theft: am I or am I not guilty by putting it in a pocket?

Page 4

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

Another choice is offered the same moment to place the nut in the open palm of my other gloved hand, when chosen I realize not only forgotten it will never know a bolt and the threads it will never be wound through, like some rare relationship being started, required to hold together a building, the essential dreams of a new owner and his open, virus-free company.

WHERE I ENDED UP ONE MORNING

By Chad Norman Spittle on a pillow no more than the stain a dream left behind to say how a dead father still mumbles the three words he couldn't bring his mouth to lift while our hearts both longed to carry them.

By Hector Silva

By Hector Silva

Page 5

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

Down in the Ground

By Bruce Meyer

Miners don’t come up singing from the pit at the end of the day like they do in the movies. The older members of the family always pointed that out when they watched the old films about hardship and drama down in the ground. Men came up exhausted. As a tribute to their heritage, the family kept two Victorian bird cages and a newer cage purchased at a big-box pet store as reminders of where they had come from.

The larger of the two was a keepsake brought from the family’s old country town near Bolsover. It was ornate brass. The bars were almost far enough apart for a bird to slip through, though not quite. The latch on the door was decorated in scroll work, and from a hook that dangled from the cupola hung a wire swing that was sleeved with a wooden cuff. Over the years, perch cylinder had been sanded so that it was thin now and hard for a bird to wrap its claws around. By today’s standards it wasn’t a useful cage for a canary, but long ago it was tradition to keep a trilling canary in the house to brighten everyone’s spirits during the day. If the bird sang at night, however, the music was an ill omen. Someone was going to die.

The second cage, a box made of forged wrought iron rods, held a more ominous story. It sat on the mantel. The cage had survived the mines. It had been carried down in the ground by a Page 6

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

great grandfather who worked the coal seams of the English Midlands before emigrating to Canada. Early each morning, the men of the town would file out the laneway doors of their cramped back yards, and head up the hill to the shaft. A huge wheel stood at the pit-head where wooden-gated elevators of men in work clothes were lowered into the earth at the beginning of the day, and if they were lucky, were raised up at the end of a twelve-hour shift looking as if they had come from the fires of hell, the whites of their eyes round, empty, and exhausted. They carried their pick axes and oil lamps in one hand and their iron cages and canary in the other. They had lived another day to feed their families.

The great-grandfather, and generations before him, must have dug every square inch of coal from the darkness of the deep below their town because the old mine collapsed one morning and swallowed the streets, houses, shops, banks, churches, and graveyards where the family lived and died and been buried long before anyone began recording the history of the place.

Their heritage sank into the abyss as if the ground was time itself, cloaking, impenetrable, and silent. “That is what becomes of the past, of work, love, life, and even death,” some of the family elders said. “It all goes down in the ground.”

A newspaper clipping in a book on the shelf next to the mantel, a fragile, yellowing scrap of paper torn from a Midlands tabloid, described how there had been a rumbling, a moaning as if the earth were giving its last gasp, and then the town was gone to the sound of walls falling, windows shattering, and pianos crashing to their last notes. Local authorities erected a fence around the area and rerouted the roads – roads had led there long before the Doomsday Book. A photograph in the article showed several of the row houses leaning and tipped into the earth. One address was almost intact, as if it had simply put itself down for a nap, never to wake again. A lace curtain hung out through the glass of a broken window like the tongue of a battered boxer or a cartoon character who has x’s where his dead eyes used to be.

When the town collapsed, several of the older family members said it was a shame the government had placed mechanical detectors in the caverns instead of live canaries. The canaries would have been more reliable. Lives could have been saved. Canaries not only warned miners of poisonous gas build-up: if the birds stopped singing it was also the sign of an impending collapse. But who would have looked after the creatures? Who would be brave enough or fool enough to go down in the ground each day and bring the birds back to the surface while sending others down in their place? There is no fury like the hell beneath us, they said. Even when we are alive and walking through our homes or meadows or streets, they proffered, we are walking on our own graves. That is the reality no one wants to acknowledge, they said. Once, long ago, we knew the past but have forgotten it today. Government officials said the birds were unreliable, antique icons of a mythology of labour in an era when dying was the way people made their living.

Mining families, such as the great-grandmother’s, bred birds for their ability to sing, even in the dank and lightless confines of a coal seam. That art had been lost. The newer varieties of canaries came from breeding factories in Germany. The new ones were delicate pets, not working companions who gave their lives so that others might live. The pit birds were born to sing, and if the singing stopped, they died for their living. The sound of the pick axes striking the walls of black rock made the birds want to sing even harder. They were meant to inspire the miners the way a piper inspires soldiers in a battle.

It was a hard life, the mother told her children, when they asked why the family always had canaries. Everything about coal, their mother told them, was black. Their great-grandfather Page 7

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

had died of black lung. If it was a child’s duty to stoke the furnace on a winter night, his hands would be black when he emerged from the basement. Even the yellow canaries that their ancestors carried down in the ground would emerge sooty. Their fabled great-grandfather, the immigrant to Canada, had been through five canaries from his boyhood until he joined up to fight in the war. Three of the canaries had died when the shafts gassed up. One had caught a cold in a draft because canaries are delicate no matter how broad their chests or how powerful their song. The other had died of sorrow when great grandfather went away to fight in the war.

The family always kept a canary in the house, not just as a reminder of the past but because they could not remember a time when there wasn’t one among them. The current pet, Pavarotti, had a broad chest for a canary. He was bright yellow and was approaching the age of twelve. He was still loud enough to be heard on the other side of the street. Those who passed the house on summer days when the windows were open often stopped to listen and try to figure out where the bird was singing. Pavarotti didn’t live in the iron canary box or in the elaborate brass cage. He had a newer model cage with a cuttlebone clipped to the side bars and a plastic swing he never sat on. His door was always open, but he never left his cage. The world inside the bars was his own territory. If someone put their hand in the cage, Pavarotti would attack it. Each canary – and only the males sang – had his own personality, and possessed a strange sense that their work was important. They responded to their owners, hopping up to the bars for a piece of grape or eating from the miner’s hand when he held a smidgen of seed for them.

By late winter, Pavarotti was not well. He hadn’t been well for several weeks. His once powerful song had diminished to a disconsolate chirp, then a hoarse croak. Canaries rarely live that long, the mother told her children. They waited and watched. They knew what would happen but nothing in the children’s lives had ever been that fragile. Nothing had ever left them unex pectedly. They had been too young to remember the deaths of their grandparents. Those faces were simply unexplained absences.

On the morning that the mother reached into the bottom corner of the cage just beneath the open door, Pavarotti was breathing heavily. His body was puffed out. He hadn’t the strength to fight her. As she wrapped her hands around the bird, raised his beak to her lips and blew gently into his nostrils. She stroked his body, taping his heart rhythmically with the speed at which it had always beat, and for a moment he opened his eyes. The children looked at each other and beamed. Their mother had worked a miracle. Then the bird struggled for a moment and his eyes closed.

The children cried. The boy thought that his mother might have murdered their pet – after all, the bird had pre-dated their own lives – he had always been part of their world, a presence, a fact. And now the cage was empty.

That evening, the family gathered around a hole the boy had dug in the backyard. It was the first time he had wielded a heavy spade, and as he dug the hole he pitched himself as a miner, hauling up the rocks from the earth that would fuel a flame and warm the family; indeed, the early evening sun was warm on his skin. His sister had given the bird a handkerchief that had been a gift from an aunt. The green Victorian silk was stitched with tiny bluebirds. Pavarotti was laid in a coffee can and the lid was sealed shut. The boy knelt and laid the can in the earth.

The father bent down, and from a brown paper bag that had sat for an eternity on his work Page 8

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

bench and before that on the grandfather’s workbench, emptied a black powder into the hole.

It was the last of grains of a piece of coal the immigrant ancestor had carried with him to remind him of the home he left behind.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Ashes from the past,” the father said. “And dust for the future.”

He took the bird’s body and, kneeling beside the deep hole he had drilled in the garden with a post digger, said: “Be with your fellows now, good bird.” Then reached into the darkness and set the tiny body among the drowned voices and sweet songs down in the ground.

Strawberry Moon

By Bruce Meyer

The strawberry farm where Time grows is far beyond the reach of houses.

Streets end where berry rows spread in martyred red from the earth, where fences become casual remarks, and boundaries are off-hand as stories recounted by an astonished traveller.

He explains his heart needed to come home, red and ripe from miles of sun and recalls they are sweet with the taste of his youth, when meadowlarks caught their shadows and carried them away so death would have no place beneath a Strawberry Moon when the best fruits lie hidden in the tangle of broad green leaves and touch is the only way they are found.

Here is a basket picked this morning.

They have dew on them like jewels, and at first glance could pass for stars where the Milky Way opened its delicate heart to leave its light on the tip of the tongue.

Page 9

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

THE HOURS

by Bruce Meyer

An entire book could not explain the changes that hours work upon the world. Some hours begin as nodes upon a branch.

They pass, they burst into life, and then they fade away.

As the temperature began to climb in early July of 1911, Angelo feared the heat would vanquish every second in which the world breathed life.

“Roses, they don’t want heat,” he told Mrs. Henderson. “The rose, she likes the cool morning sun and the dew she welcomes after dark.”

Mrs. Henderson understood. She could picture the petals after a heavy rain or a cool night followed by morning warmth. That’s what made the dew, the quicksilver droplets of renewed life. She wanted to tell him that gardening roses was the highest calling a person could pursue if they worked to raise life from the soil.

In July of 1911, a heat wave struck the eastern seaboard of North America. The roses died off one by one, just as they began to bud and open with the perfume adored by saints and angels.

Angelo did not know what to do. On the first morning of fiery air, he stood in the center of Mrs. Henderson’s garden as the church clock chimed a few blocks away. He needed to gather himself before he could knock on her terrace doors to tell her he could not save her precious bushes.

She had acquired the roses from all over the world, collecting them as one might collect postage stamps or rare minerals. Her collection made the small, enclosed garden beyond the dining room’s French doors into an album or a horticultural display. On one wall of the rose garden, he grew roses she had acquired from the monastery gardens of southern Europe. These were the romantic roses of medieval dream vision poetry written in Old French, Catalan, and la Lingua Franca of the Provencal troubadours.

On another wall, and hardier than the delicate French and Spanish bushes, were her English roses. These, she thought, expressed a mannered womanhood, expressing the stout courage displayed by Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey, as their necks were set on the chopping block, their arms were spread, and they flew like startled birds into the pages of history. The English roses were long and slender. Their thin bodies produced small, dainty blossoms that attracted honeybees from the apiary Angelo tended beyond the inner garden wall. Though the bees were attracted to the perfume of the English rose, they could not live on those blooms alone.

Angelo fed the bees on lavender and bergamot and their honey carried the subtle aroma of tea and scones.

The third wall, the west face of the garden, caught the best of a frank summer morning. There, he planted bushes Mrs. Henderson acquired in California, and in Mexico, from the ancient missions Jesuits had carved from the desert sands. Those bushes were exotic and strong. They were effusive to the nose, with a full scent that captivated anyone who strolled past them at the break of day. Their full bouquet was enough to persuade a non-believer that the Lord Page 10

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

spoke through their blossoms and that the blossoms were the words of the Savior spreading through the world. These American roses, as she dubbed them, needed the least amount of work. They were sturdy and could stand the worst of east coast winters.

Some of the roses had been purchased at auctions; others Angelo carefully rooted in the conservatory from mere shoots. With every clipping that reached down and attached itself to the New World’s soil, Angelo felt as if a part of him was putting down roots for the generations of his own family to whom he had promised passage from Italy. Their new roots were reflections of his desire to create his own.

He had left his wife in Italy, promising her that when he was a wealthy man in America he would send for her, though, wealth had yet eluded him. He was a humble gardener, and although he took great pride in his work, it paid very little. The roses were his children. His reward, he felt, was partly in this world and partly in the next. And he had his friendship with Mrs. Henderson who took him into her confidence to share with him the secrets of her passion for the flower of God. Like a good father, Angelo knew more about his children, his roses, than anyone. Perhaps with the exception of Mrs. Henderson. She visited as many of the world’s major art galleries as she could, to study in minute detail the careful brushstrokes of seventeenth century Dutch masters like Nicolaes van Veerendael, Jan van Huysum, and her beloved Rachel Ruysch, who had invented her own style for depicting roses in full bloom.

Through her husband’s international business connections, Mrs. Henderson exchanged clippings from her collection, to broaden her garden. The effect was that it was always brimming on a summer morning with blooms that would have rivaled the Empress Josephine’s famed rose beds at Malmaison. The Empress had achieved the impossible. While still a young girl, she raised a bed of roses in St. Lucia, in the volcanic soil of her parents’ estate outside Soufriere.

She had made roses bloom in the tropics. What had been her secret? And why couldn’t Angelo work it out now?

Perhaps the answer was buried in Mrs. Henderson’s shelves of priceless, ancient, illuminating volumes on rosa flora or in the awkwardly illustrated seventeenth century tomes or maybe in the modern texts on the origins of the rose in Chinese gardens. She was keenly aware of mod ern horticultural experiments with specialized breeding and of every possible shred of botanical information she could acquire. Every volume was catalogued and made available to Angelo, should he desire to research his plants and learn more about them. He would smile at her and bend his head to the beds. Angelo could not read a word of English. Everything he knew about roses was learned from instinct and from talking to his plants. Mrs. Henderson asked him what they said.

“They say this. They say that. They say hello. They say they love you. They wanna know if you love them.”

“Most certainly,” she replied. “I love them as if they were my children.”

“We good parents, si ?”

“Yes,” she replied. “We are good parents.”

Roses had survived for centuries. They were honoured by poets, worshipped by kings, and held in veneration by holy men who proclaimed the divinity in their fragrance. There were yellow bushes with a bramble of thorns the length of every stem. They were said to have come from a rare bush Alexander the Great had planted to please his Queen at Persepolis. There were white buds that spread into expansive floribundas which had come from the Monastery at Page 11

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

Capistrano. There were Bansianae from the Orient, Bracteatae from India, Caninae from Central Asia, Carolinae from the forests of the Appalachians, and her favorites, the Rosa Mundi, “rose of the world”, mentioned in Medieval hymns and poems to a minstrel’s love obsession.

The most treasured, according to Mrs. Henderson, was a long-stemmed red rosa mundi that had come from a long-lost garden in Burgundy where it not only had its own bed but was surrounded by a cooling fountain meant to symbolize the four rivers of Eden.

There were a variety of wild Irish roses her husband had collected and that he brought to the country house where Mrs. Henderson was not permitted. She often wondered if those flowers had much to say about her husband. She envisioned him taking their blooms and then casting them aside. Her husband’s business associates often made jokes. Did her husband tend to them with the same love she showed her own roses? Angelo understood what the businessmen meant but he did not think it his place to explain it to Mrs. Henderson if she didn’t understand.

And if she did understand, he thought she was a brave woman who remained strong in the face of the deceptions being visited upon her.

By instinct, Angelo knew what the roses needed. He knew it was deadly to water a rose in the heat of the day. He sat with the plants and talked to them, mostly in the dialect of Abruzzo, where he had been born. His father had tended a wealthy man’s vineyard where he grew Sangiovese grapes. Because roses are raised in shade and grapes in bright sunlight, Angelo chose to work in the garden of the palazzo because the heat on the back of his neck made his head ache and his eyes squint. Gardens, he decided, were meant to be places of repose and shade. He leaned over and inhaled the perfume of a perfect bloom before saying a silent prayer and snipping it with his cutters to present to Mrs. Henderson as her daily gift.

Once, Mrs. Henderson had asked Angelo what it was like to grow up in Italy.

“It must have been magic to be surrounded by the beauty of ancient things and the soil that offered so many delicacies.”

Angelo hemmed and hawed. He raised his shoulders and the palms of his hands, as if unsure what his employer wanted to hear.

“The church of my town; it had a saint. The church, she was named Santa Paderno d’Angelica.

The saint, too. My Mama ask I be baptized and named for the saint. Mama, how you say, cele brate God,” and Angelo moved his hands in a broad fanning motion. “The saint, he cured sick people during the plague.”

“The pandemic.”

“Yeah. Pandemic. He spoon-feed the people rose water. From the red petals of the Basilica’s garden. It work on everyone except Santa Paderno, and he die.” Angelo crossed himself. “When it time to take his bone from the grave and put him in bone house –” “A charnel house?”

“Yes. Santa Paderno body not rotten. He smell of roses. We make him saint. So, I love roses.

Bene?”

Mrs. Henderson had mapped her rose garden according to La Romain de la Rose, the Medieval French ‘dream vision’ of courtly love. Angelo stood behind her, and nodded as he tried to follow her lengthy explanations.

In the Medieval French poem, a man wakes in the middle of a dream, peers over a wall, and spies the perfect rose at the center of a garden. He falls in love with the rose, and he desires but one thing: a kiss from the rose. However, before the lover can attain this reward, he must prove himself to the perfect rose through acts of faith, body, mind, and courage. The flower Page 12

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

was meant to represent the Virgin Mary, or an ideal of femininity. Attaining a kiss from the rose was impossible in earthly terms, as were growing wings and flying away. His love was doomed to be forever unrequited.

In the main drawing room, Mrs. Henderson hung a Medieval tapestry that Mr. Henderson had purchased for her on their honeymoon in the south of France. Woven into the fabric, a woman sits surrounded by myriad flowers, some identifiable and planted in the recreated garden, and others metaphorical. The woman, who is pale and demur, is adorned in a decorated dress with a veiled, conical headpiece. She is seated on a stone bench. She is pointing with one hand at a red rose in full bloom, surrounded by the silver threads of a fountain jet and in her other hand rests an open book. One day, when Angelo was laying the stones for the garden, he asked Mrs. Henderson what the book was that the woman in the tapestry was reading.

“Why, a Book of Hours, of course. My husband purchased the tapestry for me. It cost a great deal of money but, aside from my garden, it is my most prized possession. It was customary for women of distinction to pay vast sums of money to obtain decorated copies of those little books. They were illumined in gold, with illustrated pages of devotions and hymns one could sing to oneself, or prayers that could be recited to attract honey bees to the garden. This was so that the heads of the flowers could rise in praise of the beauty and grace of heaven that make a garden golden and sweet. You know, we lost our first garden.”

Angelo looked puzzled.

“Yes, my dear Angelo. Mankind was gifted the perfect garden when we were made and yet we lost it. However, with a little work and faith, I do believe we can recreate it. You will make it for me. Your hands shall do the Lord’s work. You will see it come to life. Together, we shall create a hortus conclusus, the walled garden in which a troubadour or a Benedictine monk might find the peace of contemplation and reflect on the paradise mankind lost when time began.”

Angelo assured her he would.

“I dig. You see? I dig.”

He smiled and Mrs. Henderson sighed with happiness.

Angelo knew Mrs. Henderson had dreamed of paradise and that it had been snatched away from her. She had lost three children in childbirth. She told her gardener one day, as he worked among the roses, that only art never changes. The old verities craftsmen, painters, and writers wove into the tapestry of their works lasted forever. Her garden would be her work of art, in the way that the Masters of the Quattrocento had directed the servants of their workshops to create magnificent paintings meant to outlive everything but the conceiving idea in the artist’s mind.

Only once did she speak of the children she had lost. Then, she caught herself in a moment of reflection and changed the topic to peat moss and how much Angelo should put around the bolls of the bushes. The only hints that Mrs. Henderson had ever dreamed of being a mother were reflected in the three Roman putti she placed in the north, west, and east beds of the garden. All of them had their gaze fixed upon the rose in the center of the walled enclosure.

When Angelo asked where the fourth putti would be going, Mrs. Henderson touched her right hand to her breast. If the fourth baby angel existed, it was somewhere in her vast home, or in her warehouse of acquired objet d’arts.

Mrs. Henderson told Angelo that the garden was not merely her Eden, and that the pathways leading to the fountain around the central rose were not merely her four rivers of paradise, Page 13

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

but that the space was the place where she would take her Book of Hours and read the gilded pages in the cool light of morning. If interrupted, she would look up and draw her hand across the open space on the stone bench beside her, as if to say, “Welcome to my enclosed garden.

You will be safe here.”

But July 1911 was beyond imagination. The first day saw the temperatures rise to one hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit, and the next day was even hotter. The heat wave that would not leave eastern North America brought madness and death to the cities as it sank its fiery jaws into people’s minds. Hundreds dropped dead as they walked the streets in search of the solace of shade. Others attempted to cool off by swimming, and drowned in the polluted rivers that carried the effluvia out to sea. Some flung themselves into the harbors. Others slept in the parks, believing they would be cooler there, but were robbed of their money and their clothes and hanged themselves in despair. Mothers suffocated their infants while trying to stifle their cries. The air was on fire.

The leaves of the perfect rosa mundi at the center of Mrs. Henderson’s garden curled and turned brown. The petals of the roses on the east wall bloomed and then turned brown within an hour as if someone held a match to them. The devil weather would not abate. It destroyed everything it touched.

Angelo felt anxious, as if he were witnessing a foreshadowing of something far worse that hid in the shadows of the future, fanning itself, waiting for the world to pretend the worst was over. He was convinced he saw the grin of death in a dry leaf that fell from a sycamore behind the garden shed.

He decided to make Mrs. Henderson a gift of the final remnant of her grand effort to achieve heavenly perfection just outside her terrace doors. He bent down with his pruning shears to snip the last red rose from the plant at the centre of her garden, pausing before the act of separation to splash his face from the spouting fountain. The silver spray was hot as bath water.

Carefully, Angelo removed the thorns from the length of the stem. Even in its tinged and shriveled state, the crisp petals held their perfume. And though they might have made a fine bowl of potpourri, Angelo realized that a beautiful vitality had left the world and that holding on to its remains would be a mockery of life.

Mrs. Henderson sent the other servants home.

Her husband had gone to their country home in Vermont with his secretary.

Angelo could feel the emptiness and sadness of the house as he entered and climbed the staircase. He stopped to marvel at the carved rose blossoms springing from the oak paneling. He called out for her. She wasn’t in the grand bedroom, but in a small room the servants used, to tend to her when she was ill. Her hair was loose and lay about the shoulders of her embroidered nightdress. Three electric fans swirled a halo of air around her head, but did little to break the intensity of the heat.

She pointed to her head.

“Is this what spirits feel when they pass through the firmament and touch the vehemence of aethereal fire?”

Angelo did not know how to answer. He did his best to comfort her.

“Mrs. Henderson, I bring you the last rose. Is not even mid-July. The best of the garden fall in this heat. I am sorry. Nothing I do can save it. People drop in the streets. They give up. Other ones, the heat make them mad. Nothing last forever. But is okay. I remake the garden for you.

You find new roses. Maybe not like ones you had, but roses they smell beautiful. Beautiful. You Page 14

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

teach me the word. They be beautiful with you silver coffee pot and spoons. You see. I dig garden for you once. I make again. Beautiful.”

“Oh, my poor Angelo. There will be no second garden. I won’t survive the night. I called for the doctor but he is tending to the casualties they have taken to the skating arena. There isn’t enough room there. No matter how much ice they haul in, it all melts. Angelo, I’m afraid my heart is giving out.”

“I bring you rose. You tell me. One you tell me I must never cut,” he said, laying the stem on her nightdress. “I get you water. It cool you forehead.”

He stood to leave the room, but as he looked back, he saw her holding the rose close to her face as a tear ran down her cheek. She held the brown and decaying flower to her nose, as the petals fell upon her chest.

When Angelo returned with the compress, Mrs. Henderson was dead.

He did not know what to do. He did not know where to reach her husband. He could call for an ambulance, but victims of the heat wave were being laid in mass graves at the edge of the city.

She deserved a better end than a grave among the thousands. He closed his eyes, knelt, and held her hand. In his mind, he could picture her as she was in happier times: the days when Mrs. Henderson sat in her private Eden and imagined…what? He did not see time as the passing of seasons, or of years, or of the waging of wars, or of the tragedy of plagues. It was not even the smiles of people one met in the streets. Time, he thought, as he looked at Mrs. Henderson and held her lifeless hand, was the turning of a page. And she, had reached the end of her Hours.

Suddenly, there were no more litanies to recite, no more songs to sing, no verses of praise to an Almighty who could call a rose to life from the dead earth and then let it fall back to where it came from in the moment of its finest beauty. The feeling startled him, and filled him with a sense of awe, bitterness, and fear.

He felt emptiness, and the power of a love he knew existed, but had never before thought of as love. But a love it certainly was. It was a passion as rich as the black earth he gently turned over with his spade. It was a love of stems, after a long winter when the first touch of green tinged the leaves and shoots. It was a desire he understood only when he bent with his rose cutters to purge the body of the plant of the shoots where no life would emerge.

Was it… a radiance? Surely not a radiance of heat, but a radiance he saw in the gold lettering and illuminated illustrations of the book, open in Mrs. Henderson’s right hand when her spirit departed. She had been reading her precious Book of Hours.

When he stepped out into the garden, having found the fourth putti somewhere in the basement, he positioned the small, bulbous angel beside the gate. This one, though, was different.

No matter how he tried to position it, its gaze was fixed upon the ruins of the rosa mundi, and the silver droplets of a fountain that could not quench his thirst. At least, not on that day which he would remember as the hottest and driest of his life. So, he angled the putto so it stared at whoever was passing through the gate. He plucked the remains of Mrs. Henderson’s last flowers and spread their pollen on the lips of the welcoming angel.

Page 15

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

Practicó la fotografía como hobby desde el 2018...y empezó a publicar sus primeras fotos en el grupo FOTÓGRAFOS DE CUBA a partir de octubre del 2020.......ha publicado en otros sitios como Fotógrafos de todo el Mundo, Fotógrafos de Camagüey, Selective Photography Group, Universal Color Photos, Photo Award, Universal B/W Photos, Photo Imagen, CCLA Federation of Photography... Es Especialista de Producción en la EISA-Camagüey ,Diseñador Mecánico y graduado en Licenciatura en SocioCultural en la Universidad de Camagüey.. le fascina la fotografía, el cine, la arquitectura, las artes, sobretodo la plástica...y una buena receta..

Hector Silva Esquivel

(All photos below pag. 16 by Hector Silva)

Page 16

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

In the Lap of my Dentist

By Richard M. Grove September 1, 2021

Hi John All is well.

Sorry I did not take your call earlier, cell phone singing in my breast poet, un answered.

I was upside down with my head in the lap of my dentists, staring into the nostrils of his fine complexioned assistant.

Forty five minutes and Almost $800 later i am home, lip thrubbing, wallet throbbing.

They give a senior's discount but not a poet laureate discount.

After such a neck strained appointment, mouth yanked to one side like a speckled trout suspended by piercing hook, blue fingers fidgeting, suction tub slurping at my metallic saliva I need a massage therapy session for my neck and one for my wallet.

I should have taken my new Black Moss Press poetry book and traded it even-steven for the dental work.

A life time of poetry for his dedicated life of looking into the abyss of pearl lined caverns.

Page 17

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

Your lip thawing friend, the clueless poet, they pulled the last of my wisdom teeth ages ago. tai

Yo que te escucho

Por Marianela Rabell López

Yo que te escucho esta noche de domingo siento que las cuerdas de mi cuerpo se tensan ante tu voz.

De tantos sitios venimos que te reconozco en cada verso y “cuando cese la lluvia cambiaré los calendarios para desenredar la espera Te humedeceré el alma y me tendrás sobre las hojas secas” Yo que te escucho esta noche de domingo vuelvo sobre mis pasos para convencerme en el lugar donde te encontré que “no fingí despertares y si una vez más andas descalzo entre las rocas cortantes del destino es porque aunque te lo prometiste no es tan fácil escampar después de una tormenta”

Page 18

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

Pintor, músico y mar

Por Ernesto Galbán Peramo

Juntos pintor y músico quisieron mostrar en lienzo y pentagrama al mar, muy diestro el primero comenzó a plasmar sumas de instantes que sus ojos vieron.

Frente al segundo a un gran vibrar se unieron las miles de solfas de un seco cantar, olas que en las piedras daban al saltar gemidos tristes que su alma sintieron.

Así el pintor captó lo luminoso de un sol alegre que al vivir recibe mientras el músico pesadumbroso, de tarde ya no pudo ver lo hermoso y huyó en la noche como quien percibe que es dual el mundo: sano y tenebroso

MARKET

By Miriam Estrella Vera Delgado

She worked at the Market Selling her crops Possessed of youth and beauty For her that was enough; A heart full of dreams A heart full of hope, That’s her only treasure Since poor from birth.

He came to her stand Asking for fruit, His smile was so gentle His eyes seemed so true, He bought her an ice-cream He invited her for lunch, He gave her a flower Her heart sang a song.

Page 19

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

She gave him her love, He took all he could...

He was not so gentle He was not so true.

One night they were Toasting His friends were all men, She woke in the morning He was not with her...

By her side asleep She saw in distress, A man she didn’t know...

He lay in her bed.

Now she’s at the Market The crops are the same, Dreams and hopes Collapsed Turning life into hell.

The youth and the beauty Her face used to show Have faded away, Deceit scarred the glow; A thick coat of make-up Pretense of contentment, A clown to the world Frustrated intent.

The day at the Market Selling her crops, The night has an owner...

She then sells her soul.

March/2009

MY BEST FRIEND

By Miriam Estrella Vera Delgado

My best friend forgot Phone number and name, He wrote them on snow They melted away.

Spring and its blossoms Filled his mind and his Eyes Music and laughter,

Page 20

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

Now new friends decide.

Day after day Week after week I waited here I trusted him, I thought he’d call...

The phone didn’t ring.

By Karen Naranjo

By Giselle Sierra

By Hector Silva

By Hector Silva

Page 21

THE ENVOY 114 2021–EDITOR- Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández – joyphccla@gmail.com

MASTHEAD – Jorge Alberto Pérez Hernández our CCLA ambassador as editor – Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias our Cuban president as assistant editor – Adonay Pérez Luengo our Cuban vp as reviewing editor – Lisa Makarchuk our Canadian vp as reviewing editor – Miriam Estrella Vera Delgado our CCLA Cuban poet laureate as reviewing editor

Editor:

joyph@nauta.cu joyphccla@gmail.com jorgealbertoph@infomed.sld.cu

CANADA CUBA LITERARY ALLIANCE FROM THE EDITOR: IN OUR UPCOMING ISSUES, WE WOULD LIKE SUBMISSIONS FROM EVERY CCLA MEMBER SO THAT WE ARE NURTURED BY YOU! IF YOU HAVE BOOKS COMING OUT, A POETRY EVENT, JUST LET US KNOW!

Page 22