Theresa J. Wolfwood of Hornby Island and Victoria is the director of the Barnard-Boeker Centre Foundation, a non-profit society founded in 1996 to encourage programs that promote social justice, peace, sustainability, diversity and community through research, writing, film and art. When she is not organizing events or programs to generate global awareness, Theresa Wolfwood writes poetry that frequently expresses her humanitarian concerns, often generated by her travels. A baker in El Salvador confronts a mining company. A child in Gaza recounts Palestinian war. She muses on Pablo Neruda; she visits Chiapas. Hope vanquishes despair, and love frequently intercedes: "your back a mahogany guitar/ emerging from its case."

A passing girl in a bikini, with butterscotch skin, honey hair and "breast seal-slick" strolls past a silent protest of women dressed in black to combat nuclear bomb testing. She is innocently licking an ice cream cone, oblivious. "I see the pallette of your glowing skin / the poison plumes begin to develop / shadows and fissures emerge your skin sears / you become a map of Bikini Atoll / two bombs on cities and twenty-two / nuclear bomb tests later."

BOOKS:

Love and Resistance (London, UK: Smallberry Press, 2014) 978-0993031502

[BCBW 2015]