Happy belated New Brunswick Day!

Yes, belated. The day was celebrated proper in these here parts on Monday, August 6, so this post is four days late. Yet Poetry Friday always falls on a Friday, so never the twain shall meet. You can't argue against the laws of time and space and provincial holidays.

Anyways, let us celebrate, however late, our lovely landscape with the work of New Brunswick poet Elizabeth Brewster and her poem "Where I Come From" (from Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada).

Where I Come From

People are made of places. They carry with them
hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace
or the cool eyes of sea gazers. Atmosphere of cities
how different drops from them, like the smell of smog
or the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring,
nature tidily plotted with a guidebook;
or the smell of work, glue factories maybe,
chromium-plated offices; smell of subways
crowded at rush hours.

Where I come from, people
carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods;
blueberry patches in the burned-out bush;
wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint,
with yards where hens and chickens circle about,
clucking aimlessly; battered schoolhouses
behind which violets grow. Spring and winter
are the mind's chief seasons: ice and the breaking of ice.

A door in the mind blows open, and there blows
a frosty wind from fields of snow.