Poem: The Man Who Won a Lottery
In this week’s Poet’s Corner, Allan Lake muses on the concept of luck.
The Man Who Won a Lottery
(without buying a ticket)
After a long walk in wilderness,
followed by forty years at a desk ‒
which gongs oddly Biblical ‒
he arrived at the promised pension,
freedom without cumbersome wealth,
without illness, without debt, regret,
attachment to a god, flag, tribe or even
football team. Into uncluttered space,
south of almost everywhere and
with no pet, came muse Babette,
came homemade soup, cozy bed
during chilly winter. From writing
desk near window, overlooking birds
of paradise, during hours all his own,
he casts a line to catch poems
that swim in his direction
and wonders at his luck.
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Allan Lake is an English teacher, born and raised in the small prairie town of Asquith in Canada’s Saskatchewan province. He has lived and worked in Canada’s Vancouver, Cape Breton Island, and Spain’s island of Ibiza, and has been settled in Melbourne since 2008 after some years also in Tasmania and Perth. As well as seeing his poems published in various journals, his poetry collections include ‘Tasmanian Tiger Breaks Silence and Other Poems’ (1988), ‘Grandparents: Portraits of Strain’ (1994), ‘Sand in the Sole’ (2014), and ‘My Photos of Sicily’ (2020). He edited the Tasmanian high school student poetry annual ‘Traks’ for 11 years, won the UK’s ‘Lost Tower Publications’ prize in 2017, and the ‘Melbourne Spoken Word Poetry Fest/The Dan’ in 2018.
Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. Submissions should be in the body of the email, not as attachments. A poetry book will be awarded to each accepted contributor.