Remembering – Neil Meili

Neil Meili

Zen Cowboy Poet & Freelance Philosopher

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Category: Remembering

Jeep

Audio Recordings, Family, Ranch Life, Remembering, Travel / October 9, 2025 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Dad had a Willys Jeep
That took us to school for a while

In the wet it was wet, in the cold it was cold

Our baby teeth bounced from our jaws
And bruises covered every bum

We knew that it was built for war – it felt like war

Old Train Math

Audio Recordings, Poems about Poetry, Remembering / September 27, 2025 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

If a train leaves Moose Jaw
heading west at the speed of first memory

Engine, cars and caboose
zebra-ing by behind a snow fence
smoke billowing back over its shoulder

And another leaves, traveling east
from my writing of it now

When will they meet
at the small town of Courval
and your reading of this page

First Poem

Audio Recordings, Poems about Poetry, Remembering / tagged Illness, Loneliness / August 25, 2025 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

The summer I was twelve or thirteen
I had, at the same time
whooping cough and mumps

Every cough was fire
and unfair fate and gargling razor blades

It was summer, and I laid six weeks on a cot
in a screened porch and watched kids play by

Many years later I found, and lost again
a poem scribbled on a Rexall drugstore bag

A short rant with attempted humor at the end

What surprises and delights me now
when all was despair and nothing could be done
I was brought to poetry, and saved by a pun

In Translation

Audio Recordings, Remembering / tagged Atomic Bombs, Japan, Reconcilliation, Survival, Survivors, War, WWII / August 8, 2025 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

This week is
another Hiroshima anniversary
and this author's poems
are being translated into Japanese

They are in a book
of presence healing pain
what can they look
a Hibakusha in the eye and say

Hibakusha is the name given to those who survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, which took place 80 years ago this week.

Memory Lane Jogging

Audio Recordings, Family, Nostalgia, Remembering / tagged Connections, Experience, Sharing, Story / August 5, 2025 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

There are things I remember I forgot
like the music of my father's swearing
when a heavy hammer had hit his thumb

And like the words that my mother said
when she called us all in to go to bed

There are others another layer down
that digging alone I would never find
that someone else has to bring to mind

So I listen to stories by family and friend
till strings pop up to pull with a knot at the end

1 Reply

Circling Back

Audio Recordings, Poems about Poetry, Remembering / June 27, 2025 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

All those long days of youth
before I was a poet
lived but not noted

I go back now
guided by bend grass
and broken branches

Attaching
toe tags of meaning
to departed days and friends

Arm’s Length

Audio Recordings, Poems about Poetry, Remembering / tagged Distance, Observation, Perspective / June 24, 2025 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

If I went back
to the old town again
I might
have to leave
again to write about it

Mossbank, Saskatchewan, circa 2025

Sweet Memories

Audio Recordings, Family, Relationships, Remembering / tagged Denial, Diabetes / June 22, 2025 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

My mother's mother
lost a leg in the sugar wars

We dragged our butts across town to see her
she dragged hers across the hosue to serve us

You would think that each visit
might have served as a caution

But, as young minds
may twist and stay twisted

I took away instead
an infinite ability to ignore the obvious

and a taste for milk and ginger cookies

Grandma Brander

Audio Recordings, Family, Relationships, Remembering / tagged Childhood, Games / June 21, 2025 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Mother would sometimes stop our play and send us to visit her mother in that little white house

She may have had grand stories to tell, about her childhood in England and Ontario and her brother lost at sea, and our grandfather whom we'd never met

What was he like - were we like him - Would we want to be

It was a leap we never took, and spent afternoons in leaps more comfortable to us all - small colourd marbles over small coloured marbles in the inscrutability of Chinese Checkers

Small Town Grade Seven

Audio Recordings, Relationships, Remembering / tagged Childhood, Death, Heartbreak, Small Town / June 20, 2025 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

In a town of six or seven hundred
you get a cross section of the country

One classmate's father's suicide
with shotgun splattered walls

One boy my age, drowned
in an upturned truck in a muddy ditch

One with leukaemia, white as the snow

One redhead, Leslie French, as beautiful and mysterious as the language

One blonde, Shirley Long, to long for

She's only interested in grade 9 boys

One bruised heart

Not yet hard enough to be broken

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Sandi Hebley on How Fallen AngelsAugust 17, 2025
Indeed!
Nancy Fierstien on Unremember ThatAugust 16, 2025
Gonna be inclined to share this one at my Poets' Tea reading tomorrow afternoon. Thanks, Neil!
Sandi Hebley on Memory Lane JoggingAugust 5, 2025
Lovely!
Sandi Hebley on Dad and Death at WarAugust 4, 2025
😢
Sandi Hebley on One for the AuntiesAugust 3, 2025
Wow!

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