Course:The Desert Garden, North Coast, Egypt

CRWR 501P 003
Advanced Writing of Poetry
	Instructor:Dr. Bronwen Tate; Email: Bronwen.tate@ubc.ca; Office: Buchanan E #456;
Important Course Pages
	Inspirations & Influences;
Categories
	Sources of Inspiration and Influence Aardvark Book of Poems Book of Poems by a Living Poet Choufleur Conflicted, Ambivalent, or Antagonistic Feelings CRWR 501 People Encountered Before Twelve Essay Fiction Films Fox Gemini Music Orchid Otis Places Poem Composed Before 1945 Poetic Prose Sadcactussometimesblooms Song, Painting, Film, Etc. Souris Yarrow Yellow Silver

I do not remember the day but we must have discovered this place one day on April 2020. It was right at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Upon losing one more battle with madness by friend, my past partner and (I) somehow decided to pack our belongings, take our pets (2 Dogs, 1 almost feral cat) and take off to occupy my family’s deserted summer home by the northern coast. And by “we” I mean they my friend. As the coast shores soon became banned for civilians, they were also quite difficult to monitor. The resort towns of the coast stretch across almost 100 Kilometres (I will not convert this to miles, do not test me) and while there was guard presence on the shores it was limited in man power. Accordingly they relied on the resort town security to oversee that the few residents mad enough, or clever enough to be there this time of year are not to inhabit those shores or swim in the irresistible Mediterranean turquoise waters. So we would alternatively linger by this little plot between our resort town and the neighbouring one. Hence staying clear of the jurisdiction of our security team and by they time a guard reported us to their station we all knew we would be long gone already. It must seem childish now that I think of it but we were bored and the whole world was either bored or dying. So the desert garden was our purgatory.

I visited my family’s beach home and that space and its perennial plants was well flattened and commercialized.

Later the garden became the central theme in a writing project titled “A Home at the End of the World”. The space so alien to us, since usually this natural floral habitat is usually systematically flatten for more sandy, beach goers worthy, plant free terrain, regardless of our awareness the what we are seeing is the native flora in full perennial bloom. It existence, and us experiencing its presence, was another indicator of irregularities in the human impact caused by the pandemic. The rest of it I believe better belongs in the essay, which I hope to finish during my MFA.

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