Robert Kroetsch

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Robert Kroetsch (born June 26, 1927) is a Canadian novelist, poet, and non-fiction writer. He was born in Heisler, Alberta and currently lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He taught for many years at the University of Manitoba. In 2004 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

[edit] Works

Stone Hammer Poem From Completed Field Notes The Long Poems Of Robert Kroetsch

I.

This stone become a hammer of stone, this maul

is the colour of bone (no, bone is the colour of this stone maul).

The rawhide loops are gone, the hand is gone, the buffalo's skull is gone;

the stone is shaped like the skull of a child


2.


This paperweight is on my desk

where I begin this poem was

found in a wheatfield lost (this hammer, this poem).

Cut to a function this stone was (The hand is gone-


3.

Grey, two headed the pemmican maul

fell from the travois or a boy playing lost it in the prairie wool or a woman left it in the brain of a buffalo or

it is a million years older than the hand that chipped stone or raised slough water (or blood) or


4.


This tone maul was found.

In the field my grandfather thought was his

my father thought was his


5.


It is a stone old as the last Ice Age, the retreating/the recreating ice, the retreating buffalo the retreating indians

(the saskatoons bloom white (infrequently the chokecherries the highbush cranberries the pincherries bloom white along the barbed wire fence (the pemmican winter


6.


This stone maul stopped a plough long enough for one Gott im Himmel.

The Blackfoot (the Cree?) not finding the maul cursed.

?did he curse ?did he try to go back

? what happened I have to/I want to know (not know) ?WHAT HAPPENED

7. The poem is the stone chipped and hammered until it is shaped like the stone hammer, the maul.


8.


Now the field is mine because I gave it (for a price)

to a young man (with a growing son) who did not

notice that the land did not belong

to the Indian who gave it to the Queen (for a price) who gave it to the CPR (for a price) which gave it to my grandfather (for a price) who gave it to my father (50 bucks an acre Gott im Himmel I cut down all the trees I picked up all the stones) who

gave it to his son (who sold it)


9.


This won't surprise you.

My grandfather lost the stone maul.


10.


My father (retired) grew raspberries. He dug in his potato patch. He drank one glass of wine each morning. He was lonesome for death.

He was lonesome for the hot wind on his face, the smell of horses, the distant hum of a threshing machine, the oilcan he carried, the weight of a crescent wrench in his hind pocket

He was lonesome for his absent son and his daughters, for his wife, for his own brothers and sisters and his own mother and father.

He found the stone maul on a rock pile in the north-west corner of what he thought of as his wheatfield.

He kept it (the stone maul) on the railing of the back porch in a raspberry basket.


11.


I keep it on my desk (the stone).

Sometimes I use it in the (hot) wind (to hold own paper)

smelling a little of cut grass or maybe even of ripening wheat or of buffalo blood hot in the dying sun.

Sometimes I write my poems for that

stone hammer.

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