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They’ve widened highway 69
up through Parry Sound.
Now, perched on outcrops
and staring from their rocky ledges,
are the Inukshuks,
granite rubble stacked,
legs, torsos, arms and heads.
“We are here” (we think they say),
a testament to those
who set them there,
a good host with arms wide,
or maybe a guide to point the way.

I am the bones of my mother,
Laurentia, the womb of a continent
lain in place a billion years,
magma cooled to granite,
feldspar, quartz and mica,
groaning beneath the weight
of ice a mile thick or more,
crying away the pain with rivers,
north through the Arctic watershed,
south through the Great Lakes waterways.

They came with their blasting caps,
their boring drills and dynamite,
graders and big-wheeled trucks,
roaring from first light until
the sun went down, then it began again:
a billion years blown to bits
in the blinking of an eye.  For what?
For that frenetic two-day flurry
round-trip scurry from the city?
Bury the land in asphalt
to appreciate its beauty?

Though I’m nothing but the pickings
of a corpse, I will endure.
Long after your greatest monuments,
and you with them, are ground to dust,
my hard bones will still be here,
dead arms stretched wide, a host,
but not for you,
pointing the way, a guide
to the river, running deep
with my mother’s tears.

Related posts:

1. Poem #7: We Are Permitted
2. Poem #6: Kaslo
3. Poem #4: Drumheller