Prairie Poem
         For George Grant

To go from white-water rivers’ valleys or

from the escarpment to

live on the Saskatchewan prairie is

choosing to find out that

space calls, to a reshaping

of person. This is above and

beyond the going to, the choosing.

Reading in the open world of

this writer’s geography of

ideas is to look, staggered and

overwhelmed by the

ideas, almost lost in the

panorama of

the living, long-dead, to him

present as friends, each lifted face

featured for horizons. For

holding close an everywhere of sky.

The land, the books, can never

swallow you, nor even the

furry spring crocus here — however

small, at vanishing points.