Civil Elegies: And Other Poems by Dennis Lee

Author:Dennis Lee [Lee, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry, POE000000
ISBN: 9780887840234
Publisher: Anansi
Published: 1972-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

We live on occupied soil.

Across the barren Shield, immortal scrubland and our own,

where near the beginning the spasms of lava

settled to bedrock schist,

barbaric land, initial, our

own, scoured bare under

crush of the glacial recessions

and later it broke the settlers, towing them

deeper and deeper each year beneath the

gritty sprinkle of soil, till men who had worked their farms for a lifetime

could snap in a month from simple cessation of will,

though the brute surroundings went on — the flagrant changes

of maple and sumach, the water in ripples of light,

the faces of outcrop, the stillness, and up the slopes

a vast incessant green that drew the mind

beyond its tether, north, to muskeg and

stunted hackmatack, and then the whine of icy tundra north to the pole —

despotic land, inhuman yet

our own, where else on earth? and reaping stone

from the bush their fathers cleared, the sons gave

way and they drank all year, or went strange, or they sat and stared outside

as their cars settled back to slag and now what

races toward us on asphalt across the Shield —

by truck, by TV minds and the ore-bearing flatcars —

is torn from the land and the mute oblivion of

all those fruitless lives, it no longer

stays for us, immemorial adversary, but is shipped and

divvied abroad though wrested whole from the Shield.

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