Rapid City, Manitoba, 1982

My family lived in a small town outside of Brandon, Manitoba a year before I was born, where my father was a United minister. This is more me trying to imagine it than an actual account of what it was like.

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Wind filters through cracks in windowsills
that seem to appear every winter,
despite constant patching,
as if the shifting atmosphere had conspired to exert all its strength
in these weak spots

its screaming whistle
sounds too much like someone else's pain
to the two bodies inside
locked in place out of
genuine passion out of
safety and
uncertainty.

Perhaps the same wind that blows through Jerusalem
and Toronto
reaches these barren praries

But it all feels slightly feint,
like a childhood fever

Or the way that bodies on the television screen
are the same colour as pavement
when seen under the glare of artificial lights

On days when the sunset was always somewhere else.

A newborn child and a toddler
in the backseat
while my mother sleeps against the passenger-side door
When she woke up
somewhere back in Ontario
she had no idea
of the emptiness they'd crossed.

A family of four,
a force to be reckoned with,
and so they left the place my father was sent to
from the seminary,
like a missionary or a colonizer.

Before they had even thought of me
I was a speck of dirt
in the eye of G-D
Blown eastward from Saskatchewan

Even the townsfolk
-- who erected canted walls
on shaky foundations
of weathered stares
and calculated mistrust,
who worried the prarie might
spread like an inkstain
and level the whole country --

couldn't lift a finger to stop it.