My grandfather, Ian Hume, pictured above in fine form, is one of Canada's sports legends.His obituary appears today in Canada's leading newspaper, The Globe and Mail.
See below for link to online version:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060531.OBHUME31/TPStory/
I also append, below, a poem I wrote about him and his pet crow (and other aspects of his life mentioned in the obituary), published in Stand magazine; I hope the editor's of that fine UK journal will permit its reuse in this digital format on this occasion.
A Good Person In Snow
A good person, does it do them good,
to go out, late, walking in the snow?
How best, for them, to do more good
than ill? Does their goodness have
anything to do with the winter chill?
I wish to walk so, along this narrow
trail, with you and her, who are both
the same person, observed either by
myself, or a farfetched crow, such as
my grandfather took everywhere on
his seven-mile government roads,
when wood was to hand. Back to her
and you, similar friends, with a scarf
encircling your fair head. Would
goodness keep me in its rose glow, if
my dear companion of the blizzard
was dead? How to behave, at this hour
in this light? A crow with cleverness,
who belonged to a boy and never
longed for the crowd, the murder,
as they say: applying humanity to
nature in a word. This black-eyed
quickness in the past is a memory bird
shouldered by Ian as he dies, though
we prayed in December; he survived.
Is this goodness, to go on being older?
Is all love this much whiteness in wilderness?
Or like those bare trees we cut to fix a fire?
Is it wrong to hold ever tighter as you disappear?
I walk into your furnace kindly to furnish
a dream-house with an ethics based on ice;
which is to say: it is hard until it has to go.
A shift in time is enough to ease their wintry finish,
so that a blue cold dagger skates a pond, a temple
of cubes steps down a pool. No one was more fond
of her, the crow, and the winter, than that good man.
poem by Todd Swift
published in Stand; also appears in the collection Rue du Regard (DC Books, Montreal)
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