SolitudesBy Albert Katz
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A memory of Quebec
From the hospital window of the room
where my mom lay dying you could hear the shouts in French see young boys and teens chasing balls in the field of the Collège nearby We watched them for a while my father, the doctor and I, as they ran wild, freed for the minute from the Cours Classique, updated, perhaps, for the 20th Century, yet taught by the Jesuit fathers with the same passion and reason and prejudices with which they had been taught “Il y a notre avenir” the doctor said finally. “Mais, non,” my dad responded sadly, “Not ours. Not ours.” On the corner of Front and University Streets,TorontoBy Albert Katz
“How are you doing?”
I asked the woman sitting eyes downward, surrounded by her belongings on the corner of Front and University. She looked up. “Would be better if I had a coffee. “Milk, no sugar. I am diabetic.” I saw it in her eyes He’ll not be back. But I returned, coffee in hand. She gifted me then a smile and like a priest bestowed her blessing, a smile, a blessing, and for the next few hours the overcast sky seemed less dark and the steps in my meanderings less heavy. there is a cruel beautyBy Albert Katz
there is a cruel beauty
in the old man counting the seasons in the cycle of naked trees springtime buds summer foliage remembering the maple tree that had sprung unplanted so tall and so fast that he had let it remain to grow amongst his annuals a companion for cycle after cycle he stands shivering, contemplating the cruel beauty of the maple in winter a gnarled presence shorn of pretensions standing naked for all to see the ravages of time displayed boughs bare, nests empty and yet a quiet dignity Albert Katz is a recently retired Professor of Psychology, widely published in scientific journals for his research on language processing and on autobiographical memory. His literary career started as his retirement loomed. He has published about two dozen poems, most recently in 2020 in Rattle and in Backchannels, and as a social-isolation project he has published two collaborative poems in the Pangolin Review with Joanne Stryker and Stan Burfield, each contributing stanzas from our own homes. He has had a short story published in The /tƐmz/ Review and several shorter prose pieces in magazines in the States, including a drabble that won second place in the horror category for a drabble contest put on as a “Quarantine Quanta.” He is living currently in London, Ontario, far apart from his wife, both sequestered and she in Fredericton, New Brunswick, because of this damned virus.
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