Cities are full of concrete and construction. Annick MacAskill's poem examines how this impacts us
Circumference is an original poem by Annick MacAskill
Circumference is a poem by Annick MacAskill. It is part of Healing, a special series of new, original writing featuring work by some of the English-language winners of the 2022 Governor General's Literary Awards, presented in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts. Read more works from Healing here.
I can taste the tin of the sky—the real tin thing.
Winter dawn is the color of metal,
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.
All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations—
— Sylvia Plath, Waking in Winter
Within a block and a half, three condo developments
thundering their way to completion. Still,
the backyard of my co-op too quiet,
the birds who should be here fled
to the checkered quilts of farmland, or closer
to sea. We are wrong to think them freer
than we are: we will move everywhere,
until we crowd out even the species
we call invasive, like the starling.
I can taste the tin of the sky, the real tin thing
of the construction rising before me,
the punch of subterranean drilling
heavy and tight beneath my breast. This is
not poetry—scientific articles,
websites for schoolchildren tell me
that those decibels expand, reaching
all the way to the dorsal vessels of a caterpillar—
minuscule chambers that mirror our own hearts'—
the unhatched eggs of the bluebird, a tulip's velvet petals.
Mid-spring dawn is the colour of metals
behind the metal skeletal muscles
of their structures. In the Atlantic, higher
levels of noise are achieved by oil drilling,
cruise ships, military seismic testing,
until dolphins and whales cannot navigate,
feed, or find a mate, their songs drowned in the depths
beyond drowning, maps of music rendered
archaic, feathering along the edges, till sometimes
they wash up on our shorelines, bodies curved,
stiffening into place like burnt nerves.
I close my laptop, my pulse slapping
alarm inside my wrist. I write to city councillors
who return my words in tinny distortion,
as if an interruption cackling static
in the fistful of concrete blocks that lay between us.
Out my window, the conglomerate's logo
repeats over white sheets of insulation
that cut off the horizon, the cherry red insignias
blurring like waves and waves on the ocean.
All night I dream of destruction, annihilation—
The inspiration
Annick MacAskill: "Though I have lived squashed between construction sites for the past five years or so, it wasn't until last spring, when a neighbour in my co-op made a quip in our yard, that I started to consider the effects of noise pollution and disruption in my local area. I had never given much thought to noise pollution before, but when I researched it, I found that its effects on human and non-human animals are in fact quite real.
"I started looking at the construction site behind me (several years in the making, still far from finished) differently, as well as noticing the physical reactions in my own body to the constant noise. Since then, I've been thinking about what development in our cities looks like, who it profits, who it serves and who it harms. My poem is a working through of this."
About Annick MacAskill
Annick MacAskill is a Halifax poet, author and educator. She was Arc Poetry Magazine's poet-in-residence for 2021-22. Her poetry collections include Murmurations and No Meeting Without Body, which was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Award.
Her poetry collection Shadow Blight won the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.
About the series Healing
CBC Books asked the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award winners to contribute an original piece of writing on the theme of healing. Circumference was Annick MacAskill's contribution to the series.
- Na-naan-dah-wih-i-way by Eli Baxter
- When Big Healing Comes in Small Ways by Dorothy Dittrich
- This Story is Against Resilience, Supports Screaming As Needed by Jen Ferguson
- Lilly in the Wintertime by Sheila Heti
- Some Notes on the Requirement of Hope by Naseem Hrab
- The Invisible Cage by Nahid Kazemi
- Possessions by Judith Weisz Woodsworth
