The Toronto Quarterly and Exile

The Toronto Quarterly and Exile

The latest issue of the Toronto Quarterly (volume 3, Spring 2009) is out! It is a Toronto-based poetry magazine edited by Darryl Salach. You can download the entire issue, which includes my poem "Exile" and materials by renowned Toronto poets Desi Di Nardo and Ewan Whyte:

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-toronto-quarterly-issue-three/6774479

Also, check out The Toronto Quarterly's blog:

http://thetorontoquarterly.blogspot.com/


Although I have been writing poetry since 2005, I just decided to publish my stuff this year. In particular, I thank a brilliant poet-friend from Serbia living in Toronto for many years, Nebojsa Vasovic, for encouraging me by meticulously going through my poems. He, too, is an exile and so will understand the sentiment of the poem. A toast of Havana Club rum to him and to life! "Exile," which appears in the new issue of The Toronto Quarterly, is my first published poem. Here it is below:

EXILE

They say that exile ended in 1948,
the birth of the state,
the springtime of its hopes.
Now we are in the diaspora
wandering in the desert for forty years,
wondering when it will end?
But should I return,
would I not again be an exile in my own land?
Would I not long for the dream palaces of Granada,
or the azure-domed synagogue at Kensington Market?
Would I not lament what the state had become,
the new exiles in our midst caught by barbed wire?
Exile is deep pain like being pulled from the roots of an ancient tree.
Exile is the exodus of freedom.

by Tamir Bar-On