.

Happy Canada Day.

138th.

This country is so young.

A philharmonic plays Gerswhin tunes to the stars
in a park by a lake.
A spectacular firework display
sprinkles the crowd's July-ed ooooohs and aaaaaaawhs
through the dark.

Fireworks is an interesting word.

After one burst,
orange sparks hover and drift
across water like echoes.
Then more of their deafening sounds.
With eyes closed,
I imagine their bangs to be bombs
falling nearby
(because somewhere else in the world,
there are).
To live in a country as peaceful as this
requires gratitude
for never having known war.
Peace is the gift
of not having to live and die
in dirty double time.

Afterwards,
to discern what this means,
I seek contrast.


Jean Genet writes of a night just before dawn.
In 1971 while travelling through Palestinian hills
with three groups of fedayeen.
All on the march to a new base camp.
Three separate hills with three separate songs.
He describes how the soldiers, some as young as 14,
hail each other by warbling into the dark.
He asks what song they are singing.

"Everyone invents his own. One group introduces
a subject, the group that answers first gives the next
subject, the third group gives the first an answer that's
also a question, and so on."

He then asks what the songs are about.

"Love, of course. And occassionally the revolution."

He describes their singing;

"...pitched low to improve the polyphonic effect
(usually they sang in unison) and also to prove
their courage, their heroism - and perhaps also,
by this discreet emulation, to prove their love
for the heroes."

This leaves his one unanswered question.

"Were these kids fighters, then, - fedayeen, terrorists,
who steal out in the dead of night or in broad daylight
and plant bombs all over the world?"

Between their sonorous verses from hill to hill,
the sound of lovers caught in a stream and silenced.

He adds,

"The night wasn't dark enough: I could make out
the shapes of trees, kitbags, guns. When my eyes
got used to a very dim patch and I peered hard,
I could see, instead of the patch, a long shadowy
path ending in a sort of intersection from which
other even darker paths branched out. The call to
love came not from voices or things, perhaps not
even from myself, but from the configuration of
nature in the darkness. A daylight landscape too,
sometimes issues the order to love."

"The improvised trills - all the singing was
improvised - were devoid of consonants and
mostly very high pitched. It was as if three
scattered Queens of the Night, wearing faint
moustaches and battle dress, came together
in the morning to carol with the confidence,
recklessness and detachment of prima donnas,
oblivious of their weapons and their clothes.
Oblivious too of the fact that they were really
soldiers, who at any moment might be silenced
for ever by a hail of bullets from Jordan as
acccurate and melodious as their own singing.
Perhaps the Queens believed their camouflage
uniform made their singing infrasonic?"

From: Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love (1986)


And

O

how this redandwhite peace

flies all around me.