i walked up yellow creek the other day
along a path bounded by brown-eyed susans,
clover, chicory, queen anne’s lace
into the woods that stretch to the vale of avoca
and the promise of a natural world instead
of this make believe with its rumbling traffic
and gas powered hedge trimmers just out of sight,
buzzing like cicadas in the humid summer air
a maple had fallen across the path
downed by a storm the day before,
leaves still fresh but all downcast,
silvery backs dressed in swollen raindrops,
the tears of a dying tree, limbs outstretched
across this mud swept patch, as if to say:
what have you done that you would seed
this dirt with children’s bones and walk away?
the fallen tree that blocked my path,
the bare scuffed ground that offered up
no fresh life, not even weeds,
where only spiders scuttle and cast up webs
to catch their prey, and coyotes, too,
that lope through places they don’t belong,
looking for their chance to snatch away
the ones they think no one will miss
Note about the poem:
I really did come upon a fallen maple while walking along the path up Yellow Creek, so I suppose this poem is a literal creature. But it’s more likely that I encounter the literal world through eyes keyed to metaphor. In this instance, I immediately drew an equation: fallen maple = Canada. And, as the accompanying photo will attest, the downcast leaves really were covered in raindrops. Again, I recast a literal fact through eyes keyed to metaphor. I couldn’t help but see the dying tree as weeping. Canada grieving its own inevitable death.
Do I really think Canada is dying? I’m not sure. I do think a particular narrative of Canada is dead and gone, didn’t deserve to live in the first place. The better question is whether we can work up a more robust narrative of Canada, one that is more respectful of First Nations peoples and more honest about its colonial and colonizing history. For more on fallen things, I posted last month a more prosaic piece on the toppling of Egerton Ryerson’s statue which offers a fuller reflection on the Residential School System.
