Editorial -
I'm no wiser than last week, when this corner of the paper was given over to a wise old Nova Scotian.
Alden Nowlan grew up hard, deep in the sticks - ended up wandering for some time across Canada. The following poem is from those days.
There is a Horrible Wing to the Hotel
There is a horrible wing to the hotel.
Unspeakable things happen there.
The toilets are plugged.
There is excrement on the floors
and urine in the bathtubs.
In one room I saw a dog eating a kitten.
And people live there.
Like that young man with muscular arms
who mistook me for a thief
and would have beaten me with a club
except that I refused to fight back,
knowing that he was so much stronger
that it would be no use.
We became friends, he and I,
and there was a boy who stole
two small triangular pieces
of copper or bronze
from the young man's room
and gave them to me -
I think they may once have been
attached to a trophy.
I hid them when the young man came looking
For them, because I was afraid
Of being beaten, and watched him beat the boy.
But one night on the roof we released balloons
in the shape of little animals;
There was a bear, for instance, and a giraffe
Which was bright red, and a blue rhinoceros.
They flew very high, those balloons,
and I am afraid of heights, yet I watched them
like everybody else, until they vanished
into that enormous, spinning funnel of blackness.
They flew very high and fast,
and I have never seen anything that looked so free.
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