On The Dedication to “That Single Individual" by Jim Johnstone

The crowd is untruth.

Once, we stayed up
all night
following sirens,

shutters opened
on Bethesda
like a black wave.

The ocean welled, 
lifted our hands
in a single movement –

flag after flag
rising to bless
the Angel of the Waters

until her shadow
consumed the street.

Jim Johnstone is a Toronto-based writer and physiologist. He's the author of three books of poetry: Sunday, the locusts (Tightrope Books, 2011), Patternicity (Nightwood Editions, 2010) and The Velocity of Escape (Guernica Editions, 2008) and the winner of a CBC Literary Award, The Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, Matrix Magazine's 2011 LitPop Award and This Magazine's 2010 Great Canadian Literary Hunt.