Full of noises

Out of the evening dark beyond drawn blinds,
comes a low, harmonic moan – the graders
are scraping snow from ice-plated roads
and their blades send out this strange music
over the muffled blocks and rooftops
like the call of some melancholy beast
resonating in an ocean.

This city full of songs borne on winter’s airs.

Basso profundo of furnaces and motors.
The furtive percussion of crack
alley. The orange chords
of humming freeway, light’s white noise.

Then the pines’ tall bows strung to the tips
with the small tunes of chickadee and siskin
almost too high to hear.

We are a singing shell on an island
of white cold, an orchestra
of interlocking spheres that reaches
to the faint feet of the northern lights,

who will dance if you sing to them.
Open the curtains. 

About this poem

“Full of noises” was written to celebrate Edmonton’s designation as a Cultural Capital of Canada for 2007. The title comes from a passage in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where Caliban is describing Prospero’s magic island:

Be not afeared; this isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices
that, if I then had waked, after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me,
that when I waked, I cried to dream again.

(And, of course, I had to get the snow ploughs in. They were a big civic issue that winter.)

© Alice Major