Excerpt from The Blue Gate by Kathryn MacDonald

WHAT SHE KNEW

Love felled her like a tree
a robin’s egg in a windstorm
a pretty blue thing
a gift of spring.

Married with children –
she thought she knew
but she did not.

Now this riot of colour
this stillness     this scent
of lilacs on the air
life bursting recklessly.

This fire white-hot
she dares to grasp.

Excerpt from The Blue Gate by Kathryn MacDonald, published by Frontenax House Press, April 2026. Copyright Kathryn MacDonald. Published here with permission.

About The Blue Gate:

“Poems rich with fleeting life: an unlit candle, rain on heart-shapedleaves, a Red-Tailed Hawk sky dancing. Wild love in the first bite ofan apple. Grief, a leaf perpetually falling.Poems that point us beyond the unseen. Poems that sing us home.”

— Susan Musgrave, author of Hunger

About Kathryn MacDonald:

Kathryn MacDonald’s poetry has been published in Room, FreeFall and other Canadian literary journals and anthologies, as well as internationally in the U.K., U.S., and other countries. Her new poetry collection, The Blue Gate is forthcoming Spring 2026 with Frontenac House. Wayside, a chapbook, is forthcoming Winter 2026 with Big Pond Rumours Press.Liminal Spaces is a chapbook anthology of ekphrastic poetry by Kathryn and three fellow-poets (2025). She is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (poetry chapbook, 2024), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems (2010) and Calla & Édourd (novel, 2009). For more information: https://kathrynmacdonald.com.