Vula / Vela
After torture, after being left by the police in Swaziland,
Joe and Barbara Pillay came to the Tallcree reserve,
refugee teachers became the northern node in Alberta,
an early email network Tim Jenkin created and taught
how to use the encrypted, unbreakable command
and control system that would bring down Apartheid:
Operation Vula, meaning “open the road” in Xhosa.
A decade earlier, a double flash of light reaches
Vela Hotel, an American satellite watching islands
annexed by South Africa, discovered by Barentszoon
Lam of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie.
This is the only country that’s created and destroyed
a nuclear arsenal, once in partnership with the only
country to create and deny the capacity others
embrace openly: to kill without limit, and call it defence.
McLuhan called Canada the land of the DEW Line — a country on the periphery with a clearer view of the changes happening at the centre. The Distant Early Warning radar stations along the Arctic looked outward, watching for Soviet bombers that never came. Less remembered: in the late 1980s, another communications infrastructure was running through the Canadian north, focused in the opposite direction. Not surveillance from the periphery, but liberation traffic from it.
Poem for John de Gruchy
Our worst losses were so deeply hidden, we could rise
in the space between wars without seeing this world
is a wound channel. Our innocence was a slow poison
radiating through the night. Our enlightenment, the medic
shot through the liver who lives long enough to reason
his way to his fate with so little time left to discover
gratitude while his friends watch. Before it became
a proving ground for Israel and South Africa, the Overberg
passed as a pocket of peace. If U-Boats lurked beyond
the Overstrand, you saw only whales. When we signed magis
after our names on every test, we heard Andrea True singing
More, More, More. You were climbing your seven storeys
at Stellenbosch then, only to discover this is just the front range.
Your reward, like Moses’, is a vista of hell’s higher peaks.
Walvisvangst in de Poolzee
It’s an enclosing world: three ships, four boats,
their Basque and Frisian crews in the foreground,
flensing and harpooning bowheads while a baleen
and blank-eyed, badly-rendered walruses
watch one bear shot, another speared and bleeding out,
about to be cut down from behind with a head spade.
There’s still time for the processing to begin
before the pink sky darkens toward Greenland,
before Miseryfjellet disappears in Barentszoon’s sea —
blackness but for the light among the carcasses,
the tryworks’ fires boiling blubber through the night,
three ships hove to, three whales flayed on ice.
On every mast, oranje-blanje-blauwe
becomes the sky, the muzzle flash, the blood;
the snow, the sails, the gulls;
the sea, the whales, the shadowed land.
Now come three fates: what was, what is,
what may become one warming polar sea.
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