Not the Great Canadian Novel

 

We're not writing the Great Canadian Novel here,
just putting some words down to say
I was here and this is what is happening
on the day after St. Patrick's Day, 2021,
a nod back in time to my great-grandmother Julie,
who fled the potato famine in County Cork,
and wed a man laying track for
the first railroad across North America.
A hard-bitten life.

As a girl, my grandma saw
the ruts in the ground made by
covered wagons not that long before.
She lived almost 100 years,
in a different time
than we do. Even my childhood
felt sweeter, kinder, simpler.
There was no excess, just careful living
by those who had hungered
through the Great Depression.

There was judgement and racism, yes,
but there were no mass shootings
by fanatical white supremacists.
There was the Ku Klux Klan
down South, but they
were not members of the Senate,
trying to destroy democracy from within
and calling it patriotism.

We're not writing the Great Canadian Novel here.
Perhaps it would classify as a prophetic
Orwellian nightmare gone awry,
more apocalyptic than those
ahead-of-their-time writers could ever
have foreseen. I hold onto hope
from crisis to crisis, and ride the waves
of everything in between.

Inspired by "We're Not Writing Anthologies Here" by Maya Stein