Mother’s Touch

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What I Learned From My Mother I learned from my mother how to love the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants … Continue reading →

A Toast To Canada

Blue Jays Baseball Game on Canada Day, July 1, 2014 courtesy photo by my sister

O Canada, I have not forgotten you,

and as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision   

of a bookcase, I pray that I remain in your vast,

polar, North American memory.

You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.   

You are Jean de Brébeuf with his martyr’s necklace of hatchet heads.

You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on the wall.

You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.   

You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.   

But not only that.

You are the two boys with pails walking along that road,   

and one of them, the taller one minus the straw hat, is me.

Billy Collins, “Canada” from The Art of Drowning. Copyright © 1995 by Billy Collins. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press, www.pitt.edu/~press/ (Source: The Art of Drowning (1995) via Poetry Foundation)

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