You saw the war start on your sister’s TV:
masks and camouflage gear. Before that,
you saw nothing at all.
Until you knew what it meant,
what could you know? High-school history,
blue textbook, Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemant.
From a distance, five miles or more,
what can be seen?
The lake, a spreading brown water
coming to rest
before it reaches St. Lawrence’s olivine rush.
Fattened hinge,
endless trade route, Old World and New.
Two mountains, seen only from the lake’s centre.
Wherever centre resides. Absent
from nautical maps, and unnamed.
Island cottages morph into mansions,
mushroom the land.
Islanders don’t return to the city when summer ends. Anymore.
When summer ends they book a cruise to Cancun.
The monastery, eclipsed, its functions
stripped clean,
is now a shop, old photographs on tourist display,
the classrooms of a private international school.
A funeral home, movie set, bells
with no sound, brambled paths leading down
to the water
catching its breath.
The reservation is a settlement
plus several lots in the town. Owned
by the Feds, purchased
from centuries of history,
Sulpician priests, City Hall.
Unceded by Mohawks
who keep living there, who claim it,
time immemorial, claim the pines that secure the small hill,
claim their dead buried under the pines.
And the fish,
and the fishing huts that stud winter ice,
racoons and foxes, firewood chopped
from the trees, the narrow main road,
the farms and the horses, the Mohawk Gas station,
eggs, cigarettes, neon lights, warrior flags,
hand-painted signs.
The Oka Crisis was a war:
concussion grenades, AK-47s,
barricades, tripwires, three months
of mid-summer heat. One man died.
More were beaten, beaten down.
Long-standing tombstones,
golf course expansion,
who owns the land,
what was taken, which priests, who owns
the trees. Nation to nation.
One hundred years ago, the Oka Church
burned to the ground. No one knows who.
Twenty years ago, police raided the pines.
History—lake or rapids, seen or unseen—
rivers on. Police cruisers, bulletproof
vests, warrior code names, the army called in.
No one knows how hate works. No one knows
why the Mohawk
don’t own the land. No one knows
who shot Corporal Marcel Lemay.
Morning,
the sweet grass was still burning.
Smoke started to rise.
The S.Q. – sudden tear gas,
grenades. The wind changed directions,
the bullet stole
through his bulletproof vest.