Elaine Campbell 1925-2007

"There is a golden summer
waiting for you,
spinning a dream by sunset
til it comes true."

Gone now the gift card notes in verse,
the long ago birth on the steps
of the morgue in the Dome, the
Northern Ontario mining town child
grown to lose her first lover
to the War as she guided bombers
onto airfields of New Brunswick,

gone now the forger of peace in the aftermath
when the survivors sought to build
a nation and a world that would last,
the friend, the stalwart of the
National Ballet Board in the days
the company stormed international dance
with an esprit de corps
sprung from the depths
of post war convictions like hers.

She strove for the mind of God
with a will of steel and a kind word
waging peace in a broken world with a gentle
intensity that diminished the darkness
as nothing more than shadows
of clouded thoughts
contrasted with Divine Light.

The sister, the mother, the mother-in-law
to me, whose kindness outlasted my marriage,
the grandmother of my son, her only grandchild,
whose place in her heart was an eternal spring,

her beloved husband gone a few years ago now,
like the strains of loss on the Grand Piano
in their home edging the ravine that began as
a ravaged urban hollow returned to the wild,
bordered by gardens and music and laughter,
a quiet constancy wafting with the scents
from the overlooking kitchen.

Prince Edward Island's
golden suns and deep red earth
became theirs when the keys
to a farm home and the summer joy
of their children's youth
were hung for them by a grateful province;
the undaunted airs of a musical
staged year after year
as the core of a small island's economy,
woven beyond the commercial hawking
of Lucy Maud's orphan into
dreams of an increasingly fragile
post-war visionary,
who died as she lived
spinning hope into sunsets
to the airs of that unsilenced Grand,
melodies strung with now unsung verses
for the passion that was theirs.