Adult Poetry - First Place

Today we took a drive along the lakeside
winding north-northeast: a settler road
still holding onto slower times, through fields
and woods unbroken by the garish marks of now.
Winter-bleak oaks and maples gave us
x-ray views to bones of country life
that summer green conceals: each
property with tales to tell, though slipping by
too fast to read in full: slow decline?
brave renewal? status quo?

Farm yards, landside, close against the gravel
shoulder's edge: six black and white dairy cows
milling in the muck, out on good behaviour for
an afternoon of sun. Traces of a time
when farms and farmers worked
with human scale and power: when milk cans
needed to be near the road for early morning
runs to town, and dairies got it to our dinner tables
that same day. Weather-scrubbed, modest barns in red or black with mossy, shingled roofs and
scruffy cedar hedges leaning in against
the lakeside winds. Less bucolic sheds
of paintless grey; wind-tattered tarps
flapping over boats in storage ( extra cash);
snowsplattered split-wood piles by houses;
abandoned four-by-fours on lawns;
boarded horses in a paddock musing blankly
by a bale of scavenged hay.

And out the lakeside window, thickly-bristled,
bare-branched brush: the "useless" side to farmers
sloping down to lake-edge, now with shady-moneyed
mansions, gated and absurdly fenced for miles along
this settler trail turned country drive and privileged
space for some.

We glimpse the lake in flashes underneath
a fickle sky, now glinting in a burst of sun:
a cold mirage of summer blue unbroken.
Then, rimmed in lemon, lavender clouds
come sweeping through in ceaseless grace
across the land, and slowly muffle us
once more in February's seamless grey

Standing in the too-warm breeze out on the county dock,
we search to find the markers of the month,
and reassure our grieving hearts that winter still
exists. The signs are surely here: stress-cracked ice blocks
jumbled on the shore; white curving skaters' tracks
and dregs of makeshift hockey rinks scarring
smooth bay ice; dots of fishers huddled far out on the lake
determined to bring supper home today.
But driving home in shoes (not boots) and open coats
we can't but wonder if this isn't (God forbid)
the coldest February that there yet will be,
unbroken by the garish marks of now.