NATURE Poem: The Island Versus the Bush, by Sara Hailstone

The island holds her like the womb
she feels safe inside the circumference of shores.
Bridges like doorways have been her extensions,
the ice has broken apart and there are birds floating.
The land rolls out from the lips of the Bay blanket-like,
the ancient trees logged for hulls and architecture,
cleared, sectioned and severed, she eyes maps,
the white arms of the birches remain reaching towards sky.
The winds whip slanted from the water, cheeks red and burnt,
there are snow drifts she navigates around and plateaus of ice.
Juniper bushes encase the island’s visage like heavy burrs,
choking out other vegetation, it fools her to think of fire
and what a land would look like after such ravage.
There are stunted pine trees with red tips that echo of heat,
drought and burning; she hugs her arms around her, closes her eyes.

She came from the rock, the mineral deposits above the immense
Canadian Shield and she cannot feel the pull of Neolithic enthral
on this island of Juniper and Pine. Her eyes look for boulders,
the massive dark giants of the great moving water and her heart
beats to a rhythm of black rivers and the mysterious bellies of lakes.
She came from the bush her hair braided with thick vegetation,
the jungle of a northern scale that tipped weights amongst survival.
Grist mills and mines, marl and clay, the fool’s Gold that ushered
in an industrial migration leaving only names of honoured euphoria:
Eldorado, Ivanhoe, Madoc, Queensborough, Deloro, Marmora.
Her mouth cups the names of places and the secrets she knows there,
the rivers like friends that open into oasis and she scans the skyline for
her trees, the Maples and Elm, saplings and large Oaks, the romance
of Weeping Willows, she grew up in their enticing shadows.

The dichotomy of cultures cuts knifelike drawing blood,
she’s stepped into womanhood in the middle of comparison.
They perceive island heavenly, rich in economy and culture,
there are novelists here and poets, artists and wine-makers,
businessmen and teachers, they carry the idealism of refined
socialization on their shoulders with pride and they can look
her in the eyes when she enters, they can be kind and give her
a simple un-barbed hello. She is her own here and not someone’s
sister, or daughter, or lover, or uncomfortable wayward waif.
The County, that pride, the love of home: the Northerners fear
such open expression and become lost in stereotype.

Languae flattens, alters perception, and she knows that
some overlook the beauty of the rock, the curve of river,
for money and material things, for main streets and prosperity.
They stomp along the Shield and look down on their faces reflected
in the currents of transforming rivers. They become rough like
landscape and as untamed as the Northern vine.

The island holds her like the womb
she feels safe inside the circumference of shores,
for now, while she regains her footing, her bearings.
But, she misses dreaming and the imagination of the woods,
she yearns for rock faces, rivers carving into the raw breathe of forest,
her muse, rural ruin, she writes listening to the spirit of the North,
despite the frame of her windows that hold the edges of island,
the emptiness of field, and the low quiet melodies of Juniper and Pine.