Blueberries
Around noon
we head for the CPR tracks
with pint buckets
to pick the wild sweet berries.
Within twenty minutes
our work is done.
I think of as a child
how we placed our ears
on the steel rails
in anticipation of
the afternoon train.
How our crazy cousin Cooper
would crouch on an overhanging pier
near the abandoned apple canning factory.
The stainless steel Dayliner thundering past
Cooper inches from death.
I think of how our brother Bob
died tragically
after slipping down
a flight of stairs at school
& doing his knee in again
as we scatter his ashes around
my grandmother’s house he loved
& visited each summer in Nova Scotia.
Now back home in Oz when I eat blueberries
I think of Bob, the long defunct Dayliner
Cooper hanging on the pier for dear life
the wonderful clanging & hoot of the train
as it flattened our coins clunking into Aylesford.
The Canadian Pacific Railway was Canada's 1st intercontinental railway, though it no longer serves the Atlantic coast. Constructed between 1881 and 1885, its director Sir Sandford Fleming devloped the idea of standard time zones to make its schedule uniform. It operated Dayliners, self-propelled diesel multiple-unit railcars, which were cheaper to operate in rural areas than locomotives with coaches. Aylesford, Nova Scotia, was settled by United Empire Loyalists who opposed the American Revolution; they named their settlement after British politician/painter Heneage Finch, 4th earl of Aylesford, an important confidante of king George III.
ReplyDelete"Oz" is a nickname for Australia (which is rearelu used by Aussies themselves). 15th-century world maps often porteayed a fictional Terra Australis in the southern hemisphere. The actual continent was discoved by Willem Janszoon in 1606, and Abel Tasman named it Nieuw Holland in 1644, though the Dutch did not claim it as territory. James Cook explored the eastern coastline in 1770, claiming it for the UL and naming it New Wales, then revised it to New South Wales. The English claimed the eastern part in 1788, calling it New South Wales. Matthew Flinders started calling the entire continent "Australia" in 1804, and the name was officially adopted in 1830, after the UK formally laid claim to the western portion. The colonies werwe federated into a single dominion in 1901. The 1st known usage of "Oz" in 1908, though it was spelled Oss; the current spelling became standard after the success of the American film "The Wizard of Oz" in 1939.
Wayne Burke commented:
ReplyDeletewonderful poem, George