Craig Space: Poetry: Milton Acorn, "I've Tasted My Blood"

I've Tasted My Blood

By Milton Acorn

Milton Acorn is one of Canada's most unfortunately unstudied poets. He wrote down-to-earth words in an original way. He was quoted as saying to an auditorium of schoolkids, "To be a poet in this country, you had to be a tough bastard". This was his "trademark" poem, which did not win the Governor General's Award in 1970.

In 1988, Joyce Wayne had this to say about him:

"Acorn was the naughty, precocious child inside each of us. The clenched fist that says no to injustice; the searching eye that spots greed or cruelty; the ringing voice that shouts love "even though it might deafen you"."

About Milton Acorn

If this brain's over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
I've tasted my blood too much
to love what I was born to.

But my mother's look
was a field of brown oats, soft-bearded;
her voice rain and air rich with lilacs:
and I loved her too much to like
how she dragged her days like a sled over gravel.

Playmates? I remember where their skulls roll!
One died hungry, gnawing grey porch-planks;
one fell, and landed so hard he splashed;
and many and many
come up atom by atom
in the worm-casts of Europe.

My deep prayer a curse.
My deep prayer the promise that this won't be.
My deep prayer my cunning,
my love, my anger,
and often even my forgiveness
that this won't be and be.
I've tasted my blood too much
to abide what I was born to.

Source for text and information: Joyce Wayne, "Shouting Love: Milton Acorn Remembered", This Magazine (Toronto, Canada), August or September (?), 1988.

About Milton Acorn

Poetry

Craig Space