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From the archives

When Terror Came to Canada

The response to the FLQ crisis remains controversial five decades later

A Neglected Pledge

Moving beyond apologies

The Nobel of Numbers

How a Hamilton native played mathematical peacemaker after World War One

 

that step out onto the lawn after supper

and look up through the linden tree

still dense with waxy leaves. When summer sticks

like resin to the boy’s skin though schoolbags

again litter the hall. The breezy, open-window days

just before cancer. Days when the teenage daughter

forgets to smoulder with some primal anger

and the fridge, fixed, hums yummily in the corner

keeping the celery crisp, the milk very cold.

Weekdays of mashed potatoes, frozen peas

and grocery-store roast chicken. Easy days,

though we strive and strive, going on about

anniversary trips and where did the romance go.

Such dear days, like lunching grandmothers. Or even

sweeter, harder. Lined up in all their stunning

uneventfulness, jams sparkling in the larder.

 

Deanna Young is the author of The Still Before a Storm (Moonstone Press, 1984) and Drunkard’s Path (Gaspereau Press, 2001). Brick Books will publish House Dreams, her third collection of poems, in 2014. Her work has appeared recently in ARC and The Malhat Review, and in 2013 won the Grand Prize in the PRISM International Poetry Contest. She lives in Ottawa, where she is artistic co-director of the Tree Reading Series.

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