Wednesday Poems

Image:  Great Blue, acrylic on canvas, 10" x 20” (Sold)
 

There are many reasons why I feel lucky to have grown up in Sackville, New Brunswick.
This small town is home to Mount Allison University, and I benefited from many visits to the
Owens Art Gallery, the swimming pool, the annual winter carnival and more; we had a
skating rink, a movie theatre, lots of school sports and activities … But most of all, we had
the Tantramar marshes, which were my playground.  And we had a poet who wrote about
this place I so loved.  We learned about Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and his poetry in school –
which to me meant that the possibility of becoming a poet seemed a pretty ordinary thing. 
Years later, when I began to publish my poems and meet other poets, I heard over and over
again that it was different for them;  in school, they never learned about any Canadian poets,
never mind one who wrote about where they lived. 

So, to honour my luck and my roots, and in keeping with it now officially being spring, here’s
Revisiting Chance and Change, from Suddenly, So Much (Exile). 



Revisiting Chance and Change

Yet will I stay my steps and not go down to the marshland, -
Muse and recall far off, rather remember than see, -
Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion,
Spy at their task even here the hands of chance and change.
                                    — Sir Charles G.D. Roberts ("Tantramar Revisited" 1886)

 

Odd, how the hands that held you back are the ones
that draw me near, urging me into a landscape you

would think ruined, bleached pylons rising
in reeds by the dyke where I watch for herons — blue

beacons guarding the sullen decay of wharves, forsaken
when the tides altered course.  An island was born,

left you hesitating on the hill, yet bequeathed to me
this rhythm of the Tantramar.

We greet changes to childhood haunts
awkwardly, want home to stand still while we

wander off making strangers
of ourselves, hoping for the familiar

when we return — marsh hawks still tipping
their wings to the few grey barns that remain,

beams sagging into an old scent of cedar and hay.
It’s more than a hundred years since you kept

your distance but the river
keeps rushing in with the wind nipping at cattails, 

the mud flats are as red as ever — and there
is the place I imagined myself

tucked inside a redwing’s solitary call.  The ground
is under water now, restored to wetlands —

                                                                         Listen
the bobolink is back

 

One more note; in addition to redwings heralding spring
(see last week’s Wednesday poem), my mother always said
a sure sign of spring for her was the return of the bobolink …