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| A. J. Casson |
Laurentian Shield
Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear.
Inarticulate, arctic,
Not written on by history, empty as paper,
It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes
Older than love, and lost in the miles.
This waiting is wanting.
It will choose its language
When it has chosen its technic,
A tongue to shape the vowels of its productivity.
A language of flesh and of roses.
Now there are pre-words,
Cabin syllables,
Nouns of settlement
Slowly forming, with steel syntax,
The long sentence of its exploitation.
The first cry was the hunter, hungry for fur,
And the digger for gold, nomad, no-man, a particle;
Then the bold commands of monopolies, big with machines,
Carving their kingdoms out of the public wealth;
And now the drone of the plane, scouting the ice,
Fills all the emptiness with neighbourhood
And links our future over the vanished pole.
But a deeper note is sounding, heard in the mines,
The scattered camps and the mills, a language of life,
And what will be written in the full culture of occupation
Will come, presently, tomorrow,
From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.
F.R. Scott
And land is a language.
I want to argue with this poem. Is the land really "not written upon by history"? What is writing? What is language? What is history?
Is the land really empty as paper?
"Now there is pre-words/cabin syllables"
I like that image, of an alphabet and then a language forming, that's appealing, clever.
But the land is forming "a long sentence of it's exploitation"?
What is exploitation?
Is a tree exploiting the ground? Is a bird exploiting a flower seedhead?
Is a moose exploiting waterweeds?
Or are only humans capable of exploitation?
What is "the full culture of occupation"?
Isn't the world without an abundance of all life, dead?
Everything about nature is good and about humans, bad,
But who fills the paper with the poem if not the human?
I love this poem, at the same time I want to argue with it.
