Phil-O-Rum's Canoe, and Madeleine Vercheres: Two Poems

Two poems from late 19th-century Canada that ache with beauty and quiet heroism. In "Phil-o-rum's Canoe," an aging voyageur speaks to his worn canoe, and the canoe answers back. What unfolds is a tender elegy for fading strength, for memories etched into wood and muscle, for the inevitable slowing of bodies that once moved swift and certain through northern waters. The poem carries the weight of a life spent on the water, rendered with startling intimacy between man and vessel. Then comes "Madeleine Vercheres," the true story of a fourteen-year-old French-Canadian girl who stood guard at her family's fort against Iroquois attackers, rallying defenders with a courage that shames the hesitation of grown men. These are poems about holding the line: against enemies, against time, against the slow retreat of everything we once could do. Drummond writes with a poet's ear for the music of speech and a storyteller's sense of stakes. Together, they form a small, strange, deeply felt collection that lingers long after the final stanza.