canada is a big, wild place

now i've been all over.

now i've felt an icy ocean crashing

over my body   rocks slipping

beneath those numbed feet

which belong to this eastward wanderer

i have stepped over acorns

and fossils in rocks 

thousands of years old

to stand on the shore of a lake as big as an ocean

one in a series of freshwater seas.

now i've seen the best sky God has ever created

the living breathing thing of it

so bright i thought it would fall

down on me   small on the atlantic shore

my heart is a fist in my chest

which has opened completely

it longs for vast wilderness

those secret forests it had never known

and still   though the land was more

than i ever thought it could be

and there could never be enough time to explore it

when i moved from canadian shield

to my wide open prairie

my heart felt more glad than ever

it could only sing out across those fields

sloped by river valleys   pooled in by lakes

wandered by deer and coyotes and cowboys

it was flung free across that expanse of gold and green

and ran clear into the crisp line of horizon

and is left to echo into that enormous upwards-falling sky

now i've been all over

and now

it is time to come home.