Chad Norman lives beside the high-tides of the Bay of Fundy, in what is known as the hub of Nova Scotia. 

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

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

His latest collections are Selected & New Poems ( Mosaic Press, Oakville, Ontario, Canada), and Waking Up On The Wrong Side Of the Sky (Grant Block Press, Truro, N.S., Canada). A new collection, Squall: Poems In The Voice Of Mary Shelley, is due out Spring, 2020.

NOTES ON FINDING PEACE

To stop the sound of one's footsteps
and kind of make a trade
with tall neighbourhood fir trees
and the wind winter offers the morning
seems easy when no thought is needed.
Then what is not to be called debris
can be observed all along the sidewalk
to entertain in a way both ear and eye,
caught in a crack the frost caused
in the shape of a familiar mystery,
one I figured out during other walks,
one I have found more than once,
an icy broken twig,
a tiny discarded peace sign.

A READING OF CLOUDS*

Someone says something about a storm.
 
So I say what better time
to head out for a walk...
my favourite walk.
 
Each step allows me to see the stones again,
allows me to feel a change
one I only know as a new season.
 
Each look up at a vocal sky
brings what I hear,
what I question to know a sound
I dare believe is a reading of clouds...
those ones I can't name.
 
Those ones I see and have seen
many times when my neck needs a workout.
 
A reading of clouds,
each gust like a language meant for me,
why I've spent a lifetime
seeking what the sky is about
and what I will never be a part of...
left to stare and talk out loud to the wind
about whatever those clouds are named.
 
Each one, all of them way above
anything I might’ve been myself,
or the other curious men
I can say are also locked to
and led by unforgettable stories
often written about the land.
 
 
*written between March 12-18 during the 
worldwide outbreak of the Coronavirus.

DEPICTION

for El Jones
 
As I heard the laughter become
the weeping
and the weeping become the laughter
all that the laughter
tries to hide,
no signs of the life lived there
I've always noticed
how dirty snow can get.
 
She was looking
for the page on the stage
fallen, taken when the wind sang.
 
A stronger time
I ask the door about
but it has taken too many knocks.
 
A stronger scene
I ask the window about
but it has taken too many closures.
 
A stronger unity
I ask the home about
but it has taken too many renovations.
 
Marry me to the sky
even though I married a woman.
 
We have to make the roses grow.
 
 
 
 
I saw a woman walking with a leash
 around the neck of a blue shadow                                                   
painting the dirty snow.
 
The only thing meaning
anything to me at the moment
are the starlings preening in the sun,
in the snowy cedar trees.
 
When I watch them
and their remarkable hunger
as the feeder on the front-deck
offers a variety of adored seeds.
 
All of this version, this depiction
to be taken as the life I am living
where some of those closest to me
are eager, are willing, continually to
take a stand for what I stand against.
 
The lies about an uprooted Muslim family
and all the Muslim families
that have stayed alive to make such a choice
I have no idea about, and I believe those
closest to me have no idea about.
 
How to find Canada, how to believe again
it is where a freedom is rampant,
it is where it is worth what it takes
to rebuild the lives of those families
who somehow have managed to say,                                                                   
“We can, and we will.”