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Up North (with a pick-axe and a feather-trail)
i love the north country
Civilization barely skins
its ragged stone-face surface
impervious to people
Scavenging like glittering magpies
And it doesn’t even try
to make itself gentle
or pleasing
for hungry tourist eyes.
When they should condescend to visit
they leave with their soft bones more brittle
And the faintest echo of fear
Bound forever to the magnetic sickle-thorn points
of the compass rose.
But we belong here,
my family,
Where water flexes taut muscles
of river tendons
Throbbing arteries of relentless feather-trails
and pick-axes washed away.
Dour pioneer faces stare
blankly from tin-type immigration cards
(what fierce eyes you have!)
Creation story
Sung by farm-house copper chimes
the wind’s ringing cry of clarion-call voice
Metallic and bold.
A lament and a proclamation:
Up here
the world seems barely able to contain us
We spill over ourselves
Frantic and determined to be heard
Even as it swallows us up
With spruce teeth
into its boreal maw.
A reflection of where part of my family comes from in the boreal forest of northern Saskatchewan, Canada, and what it is like to return to this place after moving away fifteen years ago.
Comments
Nice poetic writing, Janine. You have a strain of stubborn perhaps developed from your ancestors who acquired it by struggling the wild and harsh nature conditions. I like it. :)
Thanks Arvy- this is my first attempt to put some writing on the ’bubb…so your kind and thoughtful comment means a lot to me! And yes, I definately inherited a strain of stubborn-as-a-mule from my pioneer ancestors! I guess what always strikes me as profound is that they only came to Canada and endured those conditions maybe 80 years ago! Not that long when you think about it, and already my life is so very different from the ones they lived. Guess I am searching for some way to claim their story as part of my own. (which of course, I now realize it is!) Woops, sorry for the huge, long response- cheers again!
– EchoNorth
very good
Thanks very much for giving it a look!
– EchoNorth
Dream like writing Janine. Love it. Don.
Thank you so much, Don- that means alot as I am still giving the writing thing a go as a newbie!
– EchoNorth
Wonderful poem written from the heart with a real resonance with the past. Beautiful!
Aw, thanks Connor. You know all about that kind of boreal madness- you have seen it first hand, lol! Plenty more where that came from, I s’pose:)
– EchoNorth
sounds like a cool place!! nice work!!