Wildcard Wednesday: The Country North of Belleville

There are a lot of stones on our farm. It feels like all we've done this Spring is pick rocks, roll boulders, grunt and sweat, trying to move stones. Ugh. It's enough to make someone more ambitious than us write a poem. Lucky for us, Al Purdy (our FAVOURITE poet) at Hill Giant Farm, wrote one for us. So, for this weeks wildcard Wednesday, we hope you will enjoy The Country North of Belleville.


Bush land scrub land-
Cashel Township and Wollaston
Elzevir McClure and Dungannon
green lands of Weslemkoon Lake
where a man might have some
      opinion of what beauty
is and none deny him
                           for miles-

Yet this is the country of defeat
where Sisyphus rolls a big stone
year after year up the ancient hills
picnicking glaciers have left strewn
with centuries rubble
                          backbreaking days
                          in sun and rain
when realization seeps slow in the mind
without grandeur or self-deception in
                          noble struggle
of being a fool-

A country of quiescence and still distance
a lean land
               not like the fat south
with inches of black soil on
               earth's round belly-
And where the farms are
               it's as if a man stuck
both thumbs in the stony earth and pulled

                               it apart
                              to make room
enough between the trees
for a wife
              and maybe some cows and
             room for some
of the more easily kept illusions-
And where farms have gone back
to forest
              are only soft outlines
              shadowy differences-
Old fences drift vaguely among the trees
              a pile of moss-covered stones
gathered for some ghost purpose
has lost meaning under the meaningless sky
               - they are like cities under water
and the undulating green waves of time
are laid on them-

This is the country of our defeat
         and yet
during the fall plowing a man
might stop and stand in a brown valley of furrows
          and shade his eyes to watch for the same
          red patch mixed with gold
          that appears on the same
          spot in the hills
           year after year
          and grow old
plowing and plowing a ten-acre field until
the convolutions run parallel with his own brain-

And this is a country where the young
                   leave quickly
unwilling to know what their fathers know
or think the words their mothers do not say-

Herschel Monteagle and Faraday
lakeland rockland and hill country
a little adjacent to where the world is
a little north of where the cities are and
sometime
we may go back there
                                  to the country of our defeat
Wollaston Elzevir and Dungannon
and Weslemkoon lake land
where the high townships of Cashel
                                   McClure and Marmora once were-
But it's been a long time since
and we must enquire the way
of strangers-