Cities are full of concrete and construction. Annick MacAskill's poem examines how this impacts us

Circumference is a poem by Annick MacAskill.It is part ofHealing, a special series of new, original writing featuring work by some of theEnglish-language winners of the 2022Governor General's Literary Awards,presented in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts.Read more works from Healing here.

I can taste the tin of the skythe real tin thing.

Winter dawn is the color of metal,

The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.

All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations

Sylvia Plath, Waking in Winter

Within a block and a half, three condo developments

thundering their way to completion. Still,

the backyard of my co-op too quiet,

the birds who should be here fled

to the checkered quilts of farmland, or closer

to sea. We are wrong to think them freer

than we are: we will move everywhere,

until we crowd out even the species

we call invasive, like the starling.

I can taste the tin of the sky, the real tin thing

of the construction rising before me,

the punch of subterranean drilling

heavy and tight beneath my breast. This is

not poetryscientific articles,

websites for schoolchildren tell me

that those decibels expand, reaching

all the way to the dorsal vessels of a caterpillar

minuscule chambers that mirror our own hearts'

the unhatched eggs of the bluebird, a tulip's velvet petals.

Mid-spring dawn is the colour of metals

behind the metal skeletal muscles

of their structures. In the Atlantic, higher

levels of noise are achieved by oil drilling,

cruise ships, military seismic testing,

until dolphins and whales cannot navigate,

feed, or find a mate, their songs drowned in the depths

beyond drowning, maps of music rendered

archaic, feathering along the edges, till sometimes

they wash up on our shorelines, bodies curved,

stiffening into place like burnt nerves.

I close my laptop, my pulse slapping

alarm inside my wrist. I write to city councillors

who return my words in tinny distortion,

as if an interruption cackling static

in the fistful of concrete blocks that lay between us.

Out my window, the conglomerate's logo

repeats over white sheets of insulation

that cut off the horizon, the cherry red insignias

blurring like waves and waves on the ocean.

All night I dream of destruction, annihilation

The inspiration

Annick MacAskill:"Though I have lived squashed between construction sites for the past five years or so, it wasn't until last spring, when a neighbour in my co-op made a quip in our yard, that I started to consider the effects of noise pollution and disruption in my local area. I had never given much thought to noise pollution before, but when I researched it, I found that its effects on human and non-human animals are in fact quite real.

"I started looking at the construction site behind me (several years in the making, still far from finished) differently, as well as noticing the physical reactions in my own body to the constant noise. Since then, I've been thinking about what development in our cities looks like, who it profits, who it servesand who it harms. My poem is a working through of this."

About Annick MacAskill

Annick MacAskillis a Halifax poet, author and educator. She wasArc Poetry Magazine's poet-in-residence for 2021-22. Her poetry collections include Murmurationsand No Meeting Without Body, which was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Award.

Her poetry collectionShadow Blightwonthe 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.

About the series Healing

CBC Books asked the 2022Governor General's Literary Award winners to contribute an original piece of writing on the theme of healing.Circumferencewas Annick MacAskill's contribution to the series.

Read the rest of the series:

• Na-naan-dah-wih-i-wayby Eli Baxter
• When Big Healing Comes in Small Ways by Dorothy Dittrich
• This Story is Against Resilience, Supports Screaming As Needed by Jen Ferguson
• Lilly in the Wintertime by Sheila Heti
• Some Notes on the Requirement of Hope by Naseem Hrab
• The Invisible Cageby Nahid Kazemi
• Possessions by Judith Weisz Woodsworth