To mark Canada Day, I thought I’d share a poem by Don McKay, a highly underrated Canadian poet. This is “Song for the Song of the Canada Geese,” from his 2012 collection Paradoxides. He has a longrunning series of poems about birds across several of his books, all with the title “Song for the Song of …,” and they tend to be some of his best (in my humble opinion, anyway).
Something of winter, something of winter
again, something of that famous mortal reed
making an oboe of the throat.
As though the soul – not
so much in pain as under pressure –
yelped. Angst,
angst, bite-sized bits of loneliness sent
back to the earthless skies
they fell from, giving grief
its rightful place among the elements.
So what
if they waddle, shit
goosehit on the grass all summer then neglect
to migrate? Were the geese to quit
their existential yammer, talk
would also cease, each would-be dialogue collapse
into its own hole. Where there was ivy,
ice. Ice
where there was moss.
All praise to the geese
in their goosiness, to the ragged arrow that is
and isn’t eros.
McKay’s sense of humour always shines in his writing, whether it’s goofy (like this poem) or dry. And while he invites us to laugh with him, part of his purpose is to lower our guard. He wants us to attend to things, to be curious and receptive to animals and nature, since without “their existential yammer, talk / would also cease.”