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Monday, March 16, 2009

The Non-Painted Door Standing Alone In The Center Of The Prairie

or:
Being Slowly Covered With Snow


a landscape of Canadian literature, as crossed in grade 12

I am a wooden door. The pioneers were too cheap to paint me before they went away. I have no house to connect me to some useful purpose. I stand, alone, in the center of a barren prairie. In the distance, I see nothing. Except for some wheat fields. And maple leaves, blowing in the cold Canadian wind. And a random beaver. I wonder what the beaver's dreams have been, and how they have been crushed.

Clouds gather on the grey sky. I hunch over against the emptiness and isolation, and of course alienation, wondering desolately why Canadian literature got stuck with all the lousy angsty themes.

Snow starts to fall. A lumberjack wanders by. He's not OK. He wonders how the hell he got to such a non-forested place. I agree. For there is nothing here. The snow begins to fall harder, and the wheat withers away. The beaver dies of boredom. The lumberjack starts cutting himself. Blood is red against the white snow.

Now I am being covered by a choking metaphorical blanket of snow, because apparently snow is always intense on the prairies. The snow is a subtle symbolic bit of pathetic fallacy to show how the physical landscape reflects my dark mental landscape. I want to fire my landscaper.
I wonder... something. Something deep. And alienated.

It's cold.

--
- Kathryn, Canada

1 comment:

Gordon Mason said...

Kathryn, I've just been watching a television series about Canada and this short piece really grabbed me. It is so open out there when the door opens and you can see how beauty and boredom can intermix. Long may the beauty continue however.