The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.1968, Page 26

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Spring 1968
Or tries to flee them;
Sometimes surrenders,
Or childishly hopes them out of existence;
Sometimes, over-filled with dreams,
He lascerates his own flesh to vanquish them,
Screaming for their final annihilation.
Early I learned of weeds and the need of pulling them,
Yielding to a mother’s guidance,
And the silent inner beckoning
Inbred from a thousand years of skalds.
But in my witless pubic years,
How they surged back, the wild jungle grasses;
How the eager weeds scrambled to obliterate
My fields, and my mind-acres, fallow and untended.
Was it right that so much of me should go wild again
So I could flower out my own way?
Or is God’s gift of a desire to explore, a mockery?
I had sown too much, too early, without understanding;
All the old varieties,
Tended by long tradition, untested for a new age;
Innocently I had sown, without question,
Without thought or criticism;
Confident of this second-hand perfection.
Narrowly I had walked and primly;
Intolerant of strange weeds and man’s wider vision;
Colored by prejudice,
Living by rote,
From memorized conventions.
So I sported in the weeds
Secretly, tremulous, I sniffed their boudoir odours,
And kissed their sap-full stalks;
Rapt as if “La-Belle - -” held me
Immersed in the hollow of her dewy bower.
I could be prostrate yet,
Delirious, flesh-famished, craving;
But down from the nude sky
Peace smiled with gentle mockery;
I thought of child-hours,
And the soothing depths of solitude;
I saw again the clouds beckon for communion;