07.12.18

Vancouver Writing: Earle Birney

THE SHAPERS: VANCOUVER

1

a hundred million years
for mountains to heave
suffer valleys
the incubus of ice
grow soil-skin

twenty thousand for firs to mass
send living shafts out of rock

2

with saw of flame
vice of thong
jade axe
the first builders contrived their truce
with sea and hill

out of high cedar slid the longboats
out of sweet wood the windslivered homes
set tight against the rain's thin fingers
a prose for endurance

out of human fear and joy
came the Shapes beyond lust
the Fin totemic
the incomputable rhythms
the song beyond need

3

set down a century only
for the man on the spar-top
the pelt of pavement
quick thicket of boxes
the petrified phalli
out of the stone

in the screaming chainsaws
we hushed the old dreamers
in the hullabaloo of bulldozers
dynamite dynamo crane dredge combustion
buried them deeper than all computation

walking alone now
in the grandiloquent glitter
we are lost for a way
for a line
bent for the mere eye's pleasure
a form beyond need

is there a rhythm drumming from vision?
shall we tower into art     or ashes?

it is our dreams will decide
& we are their Shapers

-Earle Birney: Vancouver Soul of a City