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Two Shillings and Six Pence
(David Thompson 1770-1857)
This winter’s shade is so cold and pale
It besets my gaze and arthritic limp
With chills and hunger’s ceaseless laugh
I sit with poverty’s brazen pimp
I sense death’s subtle whisper there
As she smothers all thoughts of present, seeing
No past, no future, no joyful screams
Just drains my life-blood’s present, being
Too weak to cry or beg to feed
Only Charlotte’s love to soothe my fear
To lose all pride and self esteem
For a morsel’s taste of youth to cheer
Two shillings here and six pence keep
My life away from some beggar’s fate
How I laugh at such meager scrip
My legacy is lost to some scoundrel’s bait
This Judas touch forsakes my warmth
Within this cloak of adventurous tales
While hunger sings its cryptic, sorrowful song
So hauntingly long, so distressingly stale
Yet my hands betray my mind’s ambition
Of an artist’s touch that sowed this land
From the chartless wasteland’s fearsome grasp
To mark and plot from a surveyor’s stand
For I observed the cold Prince Rupert lands
That surrounds the grey vast inland sea
As I tracked the tundra’s hard core frost
And fed my mind’s curiosity
I observed the wasteland’s magnetic strength
That draws one in like a madman’s gaze
And witnessed the great white creature’s feats
These lords of the barrens, of the inland bays
I observed the lands where the muskrat calls
And let the beaver seduce the zealot’s mind
I observed, and marked…ten thousand times marked
And culled the wilderness’ fearsome grind
I observed and marked…ten thousand times… marked
With my dear and dependable friends
I marked the time on my sextant’s arc
And undermined the sun’s eternal bend
I observed and marked ‘cross prairie grass
Stark contrast ‘gainst the granite’s stoic stance
As far away as my good eye could see
Just wave upon wave in a dreamlike trance
I observed the rivers that fed a thousand lakes
As their headwaters announced a torrent of spring
I observed the power of the snow pack’s flood
That fed and nourished my soul to sing
I marked the mountains with my measured glimpse
As they dwarfed my being within heaven’s glance
I observed their snow tops blinding strength
Like whitecaps whirled in some frightening dance
I reduced the stars from their heavenly maze
Like magic that masks the mathematician’s skill
Or the illusionist’s trick that traps an ignorant man
To marvel at some sorcerer’s will
I dared to dream of stars to capture thus
With my filtered plates and their golden arc
And hear my mark like some winsome sonnet, ring
And resonate through the superstitious dark
I marked the paths across this special land
Each river, each stream, each mountain pass clear
From Superior’s strength to Columbia’s Bar
And the 49th line in my sextant’s mirror
Yet my great map there in the great hall falls
Like a silent echo of some passionate deed
Observe… deceit in its projection thus
While rotting there in its mold-sum seed
But the pain that lives within my heart
Not sorrowful pity or self-loathing disgust
It’s Arrowsmith’s torment, which lingers so
And rips my heart with such subtle thrusts
Just memories now to ease my pain
Such wondrous thoughts that no wealth could bring
And marvelous dreams of dreams await
On the plains and the foothills, where the mountain streams sing
I’ll embrace death’s call for my observer’s touch
For I made my mark and claimed my stake
I unlocked the secrets that my Lord did cast
And traced a course for man’s knowledge sake
© John Morrison 2008
Canada’s sweetheart Anne Murray sings Canada’s real national anthem.
We have a land and a history to be proud of. We have our heroes.
