Mapless Geographies: August 2014

18.8.14

aka

noun,

plural noms de guerre

[nomz duh gair; French nawn duh ger]

an assumed name,

as one under which a person

fights,

paints,

writes,

etc.;

pseudonym.

Slowly Forming

A huge inarticulate silence whereof

a language of life will come –

sudden with summer.

. . . . .

Laurentian Shield

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer, This land stares at the sun in a huge silence Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear. Inarticulate, arctic, Not written on by history, empty as paper, It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes Older than love, and lost in the miles. This waiting is wanting. It will choose its language When it has chosen its technic, A tongue to shape the vowels of its productivity. A language of flesh and of roses. Now there are pre-words, Cabin syllables, Nouns of settlement Slowly forming, with steel syntax, The long sentence of its exploitation. The first cry was the hunter, hungry for fur, And the digger for gold, nomad, no-man, a particle; Then the bold commands of monopolies, big with machines, Carving their kingdoms out of the public wealth; And now the drone of the plane, scouting the ice, Fills all the emptiness with neighbourhood And links our future over the vanished pole. But a deeper note is sounding, heard in the mines, The scattered camps and the mills, a language of life, And what will be written in the full culture of occupation Will come, presently, tomorrow, From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.

– F. R. Scott