In Canada’s wide, frost-bitten land, where poplars touch the sky,
The talk grows thick of ballots cast, of truths the newsmen buy.
The red-lipped kings of empty courts have ruled a fading span,
With velvet hands and dulcet lies, but not the strength of man.
They taxed the smoke, they sold the sod, they fed the mines with law,
And clothed the land in stranger tongues to hide what folk once saw.
Yet still they march with media’s hymn and promise some rebirth,
While children dream in borrowed speech, and lose their sense of worth.
But southward lies a louder land where now the tide has turned,
Where hands have seized the forge again, and treaties have been burned.
A banner rose, not born of grace, but gritted will and flame,
That broke the yoke of global chains and called deceit by name.
The pundits wailed, the papers wept, the diplomats withdrew,
But farmers watched with narrowed eyes, and tradesmen muttered, “True.”
For winds of change blow not in tweets, nor flow from nobles’ pens,
But rise like sap through rooted trees, in ordinary men.
The eastward towns in towered light still hum their polished tune,
Of melting ice, and social scores, and justice spooned by noon.
They sneer at flags and old belief, at talk of land and hearth,
And mock the trades of fathers past as relics of no worth.
But still the land grows green again, and silent souls prepare,
To speak with vote what lips once bit, in ballot and in prayer.
The bloom returns, the robins sing, the frost retreats in shame,
And fields once owned by foreign tongues may soon regain their name.
So let the newsmen dance and spin, let smug hands clutch their gold,
The goose flies north, the ice recedes, the woods no longer cold.
The fairway calls, the bulbs arise, the lake’s breath comes alive,
And from the soil where roots hold fast, old dreams begin to thrive.
A man may whistle with his pint, and rake the thawing loam,
Yet deep within, a pulse returns: a mind, a vote, a home.
For when the snow forgets the field, the earth begins to sing,
And people who were made to sleep may rise to break the spring.
(By John Shenton)
On Reflection
My poem above is not merely a seasonal meditation, it is a portrait of a civilisation on the cusp of reclaiming itself. The metaphor of spring is deliberate. For too long, much of the Western world, Canada included, has endured a political winter: a time of dormancy, of managed decline, of moral confusion. Beneath the ice of censorship and the heavy snow of bureaucratic control, the native roots of sovereignty, identity, and common sense have not died, they have merely waited.
The old order, built upon supranational agreements, media consensus, and elite abstraction, is showing cracks. It silences dissent not because it is strong, but because it is fragile. The disdain shown toward nationalism, towards tradition, and toward ordinary working citizens is not accidental, it is systematic. The media does not merely shape opinion; it fences thought. But the fence is breaking.
South of the border, we see an alternate path, the reassertion of the nation-state, the revival of industrial strength, and a growing refusal to bow before the idols of climate dogma, gender politics, and global finance. While Canada has long followed meekly in America’s ideological footsteps, the recent turn in American politics suggests that the influence may now flow the other way. The farmer, the tradesman, the suburban father and mother, they have grown tired of apologising for loving their country. Tired of being called hateful for defending their heritage. Tired of watching their children trained to forget who they are.
This is the hour of decision, not just at the ballot box, but in the mind and spirit. As geese return and snow recedes, there is a broader metaphor at work. If the Dominion is to avoid becoming a managed outpost of some transnational regime, dependent, docile, and quietly extinguished, then it must look not merely to the polling station, but to the soil beneath its feet, the faces of its neighbours, and the truths once deemed self-evident. A free people must not wait for permission to remember who they are. They must simply do so.
Let them rake the thawed earth. Let them whistle in the wind. But let them also rise.