I didn't realize I was passionate about Gwendolyn MacEwen's poetry until I read a portion of the poem "But" and couldn't get it out of my head. I went around for days with "... a language so beautiful and lethal / My mouth bleeds when I speak it" rolling through my head. So I went online and found one other quote on Goodreads:

But it is never over; nothing ends until we want it to. / Look, in shattered midnights, / On black ice under silver trees, we are still dancing, dancing. --Late Song

Now my days were filled with shattered midnights and black ice to accompany a language so beautiful and lethal, and I knew why her mouth bled. Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941-1987) was a fearless Canadian author, who lived in Toronto. As a matter of fact, she and Margaret Atwood met at the Bohemian Embassy in 1960 and became friends. Atwood even wrote the short story "Isis in Darkness" as a fictional tribute to MacEwen.

MacEwen had a thirst for knowledge that led her to travel alone to Israel while she was in her early twenties. She studied gnosis, Hebrew, and Egyptian culture. After dropping out of high school, she attended Congregation Knesseth Israel synagogue so she could learn Hebrew. She decided that if she was to read the Bible, she would read it in the language in which it was written. Her life is as fascinating as her written works.

Her gift for language is embodied in her poetry, and her poetry is in her stories, and her stories are powerful juxtapositions of darkness and light. She believed in magic, and in stripping away the "glass barrier between" herself and the unknown. She called poets "magicians without quick wrists."

And MacEwen cast her spells with beautiful, lethal language in both her poetry and her stories--flash fiction written long before the Internet gave it a name--with stark eloquence. In "Letters to Josef in Jerusalem," she shows the city of Jerusalem as only someone intimate with the city's geography and people can:

Josef, twenty years have passed since we sat in the cemetery close to No Man's Land, on somebody's gravestone, in a garden of death in Jerusalem, and the ancient night contained our youth. Though we were younger and older than death, and wise as the night was. All wars, we said, are born here in the City of Peace, and Jerusalem is not a city but a whore; thousands have taken her but she has only changed hands.

Do you remember

How the moonlight slayed us, its light a knife between our ribs, and our knees and elbows gathered silver as we bowed down. Yet we would not kneel in that most unholy of cities; we sat on the eloquent stone watching the cats pass, apolitical, into No Man's Land. Only they ignored the borders, only for them had the city never been divided. The washing which had hung for centuries on the clotheslines was still not dry, and

The Hebrew God was a string of names in the night ...