"The Lonely Land" by A.J.M. Smith

 

Cedar and jagged fir

uplift sharp barbs

against the gray

and cloud-piled sky;

and in the bay

blown spume and windrift

and thin, bitter spray

snap

at the whirling sky;

and the pine trees

lean one way.

 

A wild duck calls

to her mate,

and the ragged

and passionate tones

stagger and fall,

and recover,

and stagger and fall,

on these stones —

are lost

in the lapping of water

on smooth, flat stones.

This is a beauty

of dissonance,

this resonance

of stony strand,

this smoky cry

curled over a black pine

like a broken

and wind-battered branch

when the wind

bends the tops of the pines

and curdles the sky

from the north.

 

This is the beauty

of strength

broken by strength

and still strong.

The Atwater Library on 10 February 2010

The Atwater Library, located on Atwater Street near the Alexis Nihon Plaza, has helped our community find great books to read for over a hundred years. 

"Laurentian Shield" by F. R. Scott

Events and Signals, F.R. Scott,
Ryerson Press, 1954

 

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear.
Inarticulate, arctic,
Not written on by history, empty as paper,
It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes
Older than love, and lost in the miles.

This waiting is wanting.
It will choose its language
When it has chosen its technic,
A tongue to shape the vowels of its productivity.

A language of flesh and of roses.

Now there are pre-words,
Cabin syllables,
Nouns of settlement
Slowly forming, with steel syntax,
The long sentence of its exploitation.

The first cry was the hunter, hungry for fur,
And the digger for gold, nomad, no-man, a particle;
Then the bold commands of monopolies, big with machines,
Carving their kingdoms out of the public wealth;
And now the drone of the plane, scouting the ice,
Fills all the emptiness with neighbourhood
And links our future over the vanished pole.

But a deeper note is sounding, heard in the mines,
The scattered camps and the mills, a language of life,
And what will be written in the full culture of occupation
Will come, presently, tomorrow,
From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.

"The Dead Poet" by Al Purdy

 

16 November 2010

I was altered in the placenta
by the dead brother before me
who built a place in the womb
knowing I was coming:
he wrote words on the walls of flesh
painting a woman inside a woman
whispering a faint lullaby
that sings in my blind heart still

The others were lumberjacks
backwoods wrestlers and farmers
their women were meek and mild
nothing of them survives
but an image inside an image
of a cookstove and the kettle boiling
— how else explain myself to myself
where does the song come from?

Now on my wanderings:
at the Alhambra's lyric dazzle
where the Moors built stone poems
a wan white face peering out
— and the shadow in Plato's cave
remembers the small dead one
— at Samarkand in pale blue light
the words came slowly from him
— I recall the music of blood
on the Street of the Silversmiths

Sleep softly spirit of earth
as the days and nights join hands
when everything becomes one thing
wait softly brother
but do not expect it to happen
that great whoop announcing resurrection
expect only a small whisper
of birds nesting and green things growing
and a brief saying of them
and know where the words came from

Cards from my grandmother and her sister, my great aunt Essie, around 1963

Postmarked 1966

 

"The Bull Moose" by Alden Nowlan

 

Alden Nowlan

Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps,
came the bull moose
to be stopped at last by a pole-fenced pasture.

Too tired to turn or, perhaps, aware
there was no place left to go, he stood with the cattle.
They, scenting the musk of death, seeing his great head
like the ritual mask of a blood god, moved to the other end
of the field, and waited.

The neighbours heard of it, and by afternoon
cars lined the road. The children teased him
with alder switches and he gazed at them
like an old, tolerant collie. The woman asked
if he could have escaped from a Fair.

The oldest man in the parish remembered seeing
a gelded moose yoked with an ox for plowing.
The young men snickered and tried to pour beer
down his throat, while their girl friends took their pictures.

And the bull moose let them stroke his tick-ravaged flanks,
let them pry open his jaws with bottles, let a giggling girl
plant a little purple cap
of thistles on his head.

When the wardens came, everyone agreed it was a shame
to shoot anything so shaggy and cuddlesome.
He looked like the kind of pet
women put to bed with their sons.

So they held their fire. But just as the sun dropped in the river
the bull moose gathered his strength
like a scaffolded king, straightened and lifted his horns
so that even the wardens backed away as they raised their rifles.

When he roared, people ran to their cars. All the young men
leaned on their automobile horns as he toppled.

Note: I heard Alden Nowlan read his poems when I was a student at Sir George Williams University, I admired and loved his poems then as I still do today. A few years later I read Louis Dudek's critique of this poem, it was wholly praising the poem. Alden Nowlan is one of our greatest poets.

Montreal on 28 January 2013

 

Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral 
Marie, reine de la monde

Windsor Station, once the head office
of the Canadian Pacific Railroad

St. George's Anglican church, across the street
from Windsor Station

St. George's Anglican Church

A statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, as is
typical today the statue was attacked,
splattered with paint, decapitated several times,
toppled from where it stood, and finally removed

Sir John A. Macdonald

"Epithalamium" by Leo Kennedy

 

This body of my mother, pierced by me,
In grim fulfilment of our destiny,
Now dry and quiet as her fallow womb
Is laid beside the shell of that bridegroom
My father, who with eyes towards the wall
Sleeps evenly; his dust stirs not at all,
No syllable of greeting curls his lips,
As to that shrunken side his leman slips.

Lo! these are two of unabated worth
Who in the shallow bridal bed of earth
Find youth's fecundity, and of their swift
Comminglement of bone and sinew, lift
— A lover's seasonable gift to blood
Made bitter by a parched widowhood —
This bloom of tansy from the fertile ground:
My sister, heralded by no moan, no sound.

Late January 2018

 

"Mississippi" by Bob Dylan

 

2016

Every step of the way we walk the line Your days are numbered, so are mine Time is piling’ up, we struggle and we scrape We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escape City’s just a jungle; more games to play Trapped in the heart of it, trying' to get away I was raised in the country, I been working’ in the town I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down Got nothing' for you, I had nothing' before Don’t even have anything for myself anymore Sky full of fire, pain pouring’ down Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme Only one thing I did wrong Stayed in Mississippi a day too long [ Well, the devil’s in the alley, mule’s in the stall Say anything you wanna, I have heard it all I was thinking’ 'bout the things that Rosie said I was dreaming I was sleeping' in Rosie’s bed [Verse 6] Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees Feeling like a stranger nobody sees So many things that we never will undo I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too Some people will offer you their hand and some won’t Last night I knew you, tonight I don’t I need something strong to distract my mind I’m gonna look at you ’til my eyes go blind

Well I got here following' the southern star I crossed that river just to be where you are Only one thing I did wrong Stayed in Mississippi a day too long Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinking' fast I’m drowning in the poison, got no future, got no past But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free I’ve got nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me Everybody moving if they ain’t already there Everybody got to move somewhere Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow Things should start to get interesting' right about now My clothes are wet, tight on my skin Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in I know that fortune is waiting’ to be kind So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way Only one thing I did wrong Stayed in Mississippi a day too long