Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

On flight from Europe the captain
calls out, 'we're now over Canada'.
I look from the oblong porthole
and see my foreign land
in winter panorama, a huge white and black template
carved with eccentric figures
of many anonymous lakes,
with frozen river routes, as white streamers,
that curve and curl back, through the dark-greyness;
below the ice, flowing in their extreme journeys
to the St. Lawrence Gulf.

I long to descend into the vastness
out of the plane, to touch-down on a ridge of wind-scribbled snow
a bowed shoreline of crumpled ice
to see what survives on the edge of survival,
what it means to be Canadian
where I couldn't endure from the cold an afternoon,
to pitch into the blue-white void
but feel urbane sensitivity in snow and frost
forming cuffs on a sheltered sapling,
small gradations as tall drifts thin
to where a shallow fall lets the quartz freckled rock-mass glint
sets white tundra ablaze.

Once more I return - not to the land I lived and dreamed through
celebrating its silencing winter - but my foreign land
from across the ocean.

Beside me sits a young English passenger.
Through the flight off and on we've talked.
She's en route to her husband
and a shared life in Canada.
I call her to look,
she leans across and peers out the porthole;
her face gradually hardens
as she exclaims, "O how barren it is!"

I think of the intimacy down there, micro freezing
and releasing; how, on the tip of your finger
snow crystals melt
with a star-tissue design inside each,
if one can endure close focus
listen with cultivated ears
detect the feather-path of phantom walkers
darker skinned than her or I, animal skin-enclosed, tracking
who best touched the terrain's humility
and calm yielding to instinct;
who with the soft webbed footfall of snow-shoes
followed frozen, named and navigable
lakes and rivers: first residents
who heard thunderous trickle of spring, upheaval of ice cracking.
They of any had a right to call it home. 'Where we are'
they'd named it.

I ruminate over the word barren,
glance through the roaring window, back to the passenger at my side
and say under-breath: 'Never call Canada barren, never call it that.'