In a herniated land where the burnished survive
We compared the notebooks that were writing our lives
Self-styled surgeons bloodwet in bookstores
We were welding our words into weapons of war
My conceit saw a young thinker just causing commotion
But a man has no depth on the shores of the ocean
I was a meteorologist expounding the blues to the sky
A psychologist teaching survivors to cry
Her mind darted around me between pollinations
As she learned in libraries of clay, grass and patience
Disentangling herself from my whimsical knots
She returned to her ant farm of tunneling thoughts
Yet when I saw her again in a world digitized
She was by conmen and abusers preoccupied
Full of doubt at the fight she had fought all her life
Unaware of the light she had brought to the strife
That the arteries she stitched for so many years
Brought lives together and conquered frontiers
That the love that she has for the world and its people
Has provided a buffer against all its evil
For she is a woman of remarkable strength
A measuring stick of unfathomable length
The air we walk through, it will breathe her
The children we talk to, they will conceive her
Her mark will be carved on the park benches of the homeless
And the spark she lights will rearm the trenches of the hopeless
Blair Bourassa 