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Land of Our Defeat

from Beachball and the Silver Frog by S K Y T O N E

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A song inspired by Al Purdys poem,The Country North of Belleville. I saw some of those old farm houses. Check it out!

Here is his poem, maybe read it while you listen to the song?

The Country North of Belleville
Bush land scrub land –
              Cashel Township and Wollaston
Elzevir McClure and Dungannon
green lands of Weslemkoon Lake
where a man might have some
              opinion of what beauty
is and none deny him
                                    for miles –
Yet this is the country of defeat
where Sisyphus rolls a big stone
year after year up the ancient hills
picknicking glaciers have left strewn
with centuries’ rubble
                                    backbreaking days
                                    in the sun and rain
when realization seeps slow in the mind
without grandeur or self-deception in
                                    noble struggle
of being a fool –
A country of quiescence and still distance
a lean land
              not like the fat south
with inches of black soil on
              earth’s round belly –
And where the farms are
              it’s as if a man stuck
both thumbs in the stony earth and pulled
                                    it apart
                                    to make room
enough between the trees
for a wife
              and maybe some cows and
              room for some
of the more easily kept illusions –
And where the farms have gone back
to forest
              are only soft outlines
              shadowy differences –
Old fences drift vaguely among the trees
              a pile of moss-covered stones
gathered for some ghost purpose
has lost meaning under the meaningless sky
              – they are like cities under water
and the undulating green waves of time
              are laid on them –
This is the country of our defeat
              and yet
during the fall plowing a man
might stop and stand in a brown valley of the furrows
              and shade his eyes to watch for the same
              red patch mixed with gold
              that appears on the same
              spot in the hills
              year after year
              and grow old
plowing and plowing a ten-acre field until
the convolutions run parallel with his own brain –
And this is a country where the young
                                    leave quickly
unwilling to know what their fathers knew
or think the words their mothers do not say –
Herschel Monteagle and Faraday
lakeland rockland and hill country
a little adjacent to where the world is
a little north of where the cities are and
sometime
we may go back there
                                    to the country of our defeat
Wollaston Elzevir and Dungannon
and Weslemkoon lake land
where the high townships of Cashel
                                    McClure and Marmora once were –
But it’s been a long time since
and we must enquire the way
              of strangers –
Copyright (c) Al Purdy

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from Beachball and the Silver Frog, released May 5, 2020

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