Nothing can compare with the beauty and warmth of life at home. Bred into bone, steeped into blood, is the everyday sweetness of living in Guyana with its river-light and forest green and soft air and garden quiet in the sun and rain. How good never to be cluttered by heavy clothes! How good to breathe the non-industrial wind off the sea! How good to see the stars of tropic picked out perfectly in the clear night! Never must we go too far or too long from home.
But I will say that the varying beauty of the changing seasons is a joy I have come to love in vast and much-blessed Canada. The coming to green life of the land in Spring soon becomes abundant Summer and then the dying gold of Fall sinks before long into the starkest white and cold of Winter – with, still and again, the hidden promise of Spring to come. The turning wheel of life and the world transforms everything fresh and afresh.
There is a beautiful sonnet by the American poet W S Merwin about the seasons, about how quickly, as the first hay is reaped in the fields, a year turns from Spring to Fall.
Youth of Grass
Yesterday in the hushed white
sunlight
down along the meadows by the
river
through all the bright hours they
cut the first hay
of this year to leave it tossed in
long rows
leading into the twilight and long
evening
while thunderheads grumbled
from the horizon
and now the whole valley and the
slopes around it
that look down to the sky in the
river
are fragrant with hay as this night
comes in
and the owl cries across the new
spaces
to the mice suddenly missing their
sky
and so the youth of this spring all
at once is over
it has come upon us again taking
us
once more by surprise just as we
began
to believe that those fields would
always be green
Just before returning home I paid one of my regular visits to the McMichael Art Gallery, my mind, as always, filling with the beauty of the place. The Gallery holds some of the finest work of Tom Thomson, a Canadian who a century ago painted the forests and lakes of Ontario in all seasons.
I discovered this great painter some years ago and in my mind his work has grown to seem some of the finest I have seen in all my life of gallery-going. But it was not only the work of a master in the gallery which enthralled my day but my wandering in the grounds in which the gallery is so marvellously set. An expanse of woods surrounds it. I wandered down paths for miles in the trees leading to views of mountains in the distance and far-off mist-veiled fields interspersed with wilderness. The sun gleamed through the trees decked in the golden colours of Fall. I took out a book and settled myself on a bench bequeathed by a benefactor of the gallery and while I read I sampled a bag of red plums I had bought on the way to the Gallery. Sweet, sweet even as I now find the taste of gold-red mangoes home in Mary’s garden. Life is good, to be sure.
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In my column last week I wrote that my poem ‘The Sun Parrots Are Late This Year’ was written 35 years ago. In fact it was written 27 years ago. It was dedicated to Chico Mendes, the great Brazilian environmentalist, who was assassinated in 1988 because of his campaign to preserve the forests of the Amazon.
