The Moose audio file (6:35).
Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Moose' is a poem set in a bus travelling west through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. No destination is mentioned, or needed. The narrator begins "From narrow provinces / of fish and bread and tea...." Which is as succinct and apt a description of the Maritime Provinces as has ever been written. I know those three things, salt fish (and sometimes salt meat), heavy bread, and sweet tea, kept my parents and grandparents fed and warm in some thin, thin times. And, though times were better in my childhood, I remember the big jars of herring in brine and the salt cod hanging in the cold back porch every winter.
The poem's text can be found here.
Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Moose' is a poem set in a bus travelling west through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. No destination is mentioned, or needed. The narrator begins "From narrow provinces / of fish and bread and tea...." Which is as succinct and apt a description of the Maritime Provinces as has ever been written. I know those three things, salt fish (and sometimes salt meat), heavy bread, and sweet tea, kept my parents and grandparents fed and warm in some thin, thin times. And, though times were better in my childhood, I remember the big jars of herring in brine and the salt cod hanging in the cold back porch every winter.
The poem's text can be found here.
3 comments:
Nice job, John.
I can't make that yes sound either.
Another peculiarity, which I've mostly heard from people from the west end of the Island (and which I'm prone to myself, as that's where my parents are from) is ending a sentence with 'wha?' (a shortened 'what?'); as in "It's a large day, wha?" or "Got quite the jag on*, wha?"
*Pissed to the gills, extremely drunk etc. 'Jag' I've heard all my life as a synonym for load (as in cargo or freight, etc), hence having [a] jag on is equivalent to being loaded.
Good use of wha.
If we didn't all speak the mother tongue, I might be looking for the mother ship.
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