i remember a bleak-eyed prisoner
in the Stoney Mountain life-suspension home
you drink and fight and damage someone
and they throw you away for some years of boredom
one year done and five more to go --
no job waiting so no parole
and over and over they tell you that you're nothing...
     and i toss another log on Gavin's woodpile
     and wonder at the lamp-warm window's welcome smile.

i remember crackling embers
coloured windows shining through the rain
like the coloured slicks on the English River
death in the marrow and death in the liver
and some government gambler with his mouth full of steak
saying "if you can't eat the fish, fish in some other lake.
To watch a people die -- it is no new thing."
     and the stack of wood grows higher and higher
     and a helpless rage seems to set my brain on fire.

     and everywhere the free space fills
     like a punctured diving suit and i'm
     paralyzed in the face of it all
     cursed with the curse of these modern times

distant mountains, blue and liquid,
luminous like a thickening of sky
flash in my mind like a stairway to life --
a train whistle cuts through the scene like a knife
three hawks wheel in a dazzling sky --
a slow motion jet makes them look like a lie
and i'm left to conclude there's no human answer near...
     but there's a narrow path to a life to come
     that explodes into sight with the power of the sun.

     a mist rises as the sun goes down
     and the light that's left forms a kind of crown
     the earth is bread, the sun is wine
     it's a sign of a hope that's ours for all time.

(Burritt's Rapids  17/11/75)

(* "Lappish runes" -- Lapp Shamans covered their drums with striking magical symbols, which were then used to divine, contact spirits, etc.)
(* "English River" -- river system in north-western Ontario, polluted with mercury for the next hundred years by the Reid paper company.  Nobody is doing much about the fact that the native people who live along its course have lost both food and liveliho