Author: Jerry Iwanus

...brimming with pysanky and pasky...

I fear not your sting, though everlasting life holds no interest

Our free people will trample your tricolour rag, over and over, in the meadows where the bent red viburnum rises once again

Though truly finished only on the last day, the joy comes in the artistry of the build, with materials at 60 not the same as those of 38

Hope is the interval between the angry waves that smash against the jagged shoreline

Some say no one really knows where the river begins, or how many springs draw from deep to feed its mighty trunk

Twitching whiskers, a panoramic adventure: a scruffy fieldmouse, regretting its curiosity...

Now the circle has widened, and that same ray refracts and floods new spaces with Hope and Promise anew. The seeds have been sown and the harvest will once again fill the granaries.

The aboiteau allowed saltwater marshes to be eventually replenished with fresh water so that they would have agricultural utility. This poem uses the aboiteau, not as a commentary on Acadian history, but as a statement of my own personal journey.

“Fait beau!” is how you’re greeted when you gas up at the Co-op or when you walk by one of the yards bursting with flowers and fierté acadienne, with the Deportation of 1755 in the past, but not too much so.