Gavin's Woodpile - Bruce Cockburn

Working out on Gavin’s woodpile

safe within the harmony of kin

visions begin to crowd my eyes

like a meteor shower in the autumn skies

and the soil beneath me seems to moan

with a sound like the wind through a hollow bone

and my mind fills with figures like Lappish runes of power…

And log slams on rough-hewn log

and a voice from somewhere scolds a barking dog.

I remember a bleak-eyed prisoner

in the Stoney Mountain life-suspension home

you drink and fight and damage someone

and they throw you away for some years of boredom

one year done and five more to go --

no job waiting so no parole

and over and over they tell you that you’re nothing…

And I toss another log on Gavin’s woodpile

and wonder at the lamp-warm window’s welcome smile.

I remember crackling embers

coloured windows shining through the rain

like the coloured slicks on the English River

death in the marrow and death in the liver

and some government gambler with his mouth full of steak

saying «if you can’t eat the fish, fish in some other lake.

To watch a people die -- it is no new thing.

«and the stack of wood grows higher and higher

and a helpless rage seems to set my brain on fire.

And everywhere the free space fills

like a punctured diving suit and I’m

paralyzed in the face of it all

cursed with the curse of these modern times

Distant mountains, blue and liquid,

luminous like a thickening of sky

flash in my mind like a stairway to life --

a train whistle cuts through the scene like a knife

three hawks wheel in a dazzling sky --

a slow motion jet makes them look like a lie

and I’m left to conclude there’s no human answer near…

But there’s a narrow path to a life to come

that explodes into sight with the power of the sun.

A mist rises as the sun goes down

and the light that’s left forms a kind of crown

the earth is bread, the sun is wine

it’s a sign of a hope that’s ours for all time.

(Burritt's Rapids 17/11/75)

(* «Lappish runes» -- Lapp Shamans covered their drums with striking magical

symbols, which were then used to divine, contact spirits, etc.)

(* «English River» -- river system in north-western Ontario, polluted with

mercury for the next hundred years by the Reid paper company.

Nobody is doing

much about the fact that the native people who live along its course have lost

both food and liveliho