Every Point Is North

Poetry

Photo by Sheila Ward

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Every Point Is North

North is not direction but ordeal.
A summons written in ice,
answered by wind
that strips language from the mouth.

The caribou move like scripture
across a white page that will not close.
They leave hieroglyphs in the drifts—
signs older than sovereignty,
older than our grief at being small.

Not empty, this whiteness—
it already has a name.
We arrive with maps;
the wind corrects our spelling.

To speak of Canada is to stutter.
The word trembles in the air,
a syllable shackled to Parliament,
to treaties broken in the snow,
to a history that vanishes
the further you walk toward the pole.

The north we measure in miles.
The North we enter by silence—
a latitude of the mind
where every point is N.

And yet the North remains:
a cathedral of salt light,
a wound frozen open.

Men came with their banners,
their rifles and their maps,
believing dominion could be hammered
into the permafrost.

But the sky made a mockery of them,
each aurora a laughter
in green fire.

Sovereignty is ash.

Silence rules like a monarch,
crowned in ice,
faceless,
eternal.

Still we dream of belonging.

We see in the frozen horizon
our fathers bent with labour,
our mothers speaking in smoke,
ourselves reflected as shadows
on the skin of the tundra.

The North gives nothing back.
It keeps what we offer—
blood, labour, myth—
and returns only its vastness.

A raven lifting from the ice,
its wings
the only sound.

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