Manitoba Poetry Magazine

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"Elegy Written in Muskeg, Before the Thaw" by David Anson Lee

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September 15th, 2026

Inspired by Manitoba Project

Elegy Written in Muskeg, Before the Thaw

by David Anson Lee

In the north, where muskeg breathes:
not earth, not water, but a third patience;
the ground keeps every footstep
as a rumor of return.

Black spruce write their narrow script
against a sky that will not hurry.
Lichen works its quiet arithmetic on stone.
A crane unfastens the hinge of its wings:
one clean syllable of air, then absence.

Call this wilderness if you must,
a word that widens the distance,
but the land remembers hands
that learned berries by hunger,
voices braiding wind to story,
aki: the earth – spoken as kin, not resource.

Listen,

beneath what can be seen, peat keeps time.
Centuries gather, dark as sleep.
Water recalls its brief life as sky,
and sky, its promise to return.
Everything here leans toward elsewhere.

Then the machines arrive:
their iron grammar.

They conjugate loss:
cut, drain, extract;
until the sentence ends in quiet.

The muskeg: slow cathedral
of root and carbon,
is opened like a book no one reads,
its pages taken for heat, for speed,
for a future that does not look back.

What does it mean
to unmake a wetland?

To thin a memory
until it fractures?

Even the cranes falter:
their migration turning
into a question of sky.

Still,

spring insists.

A single fireweed lifts
its bright refusal
through gravel.

A fox crosses
where the road gives out:
a brief red line
in the long sentence of dusk.

And under all we have broken,
the peat goes on remembering:
holding cold, holding water,
holding the names we did not keep:

askîy, earth –
not ours to empty.

Kneel here.

Lay your palm
to the breathing ground.

You may feel it:
not hope, not yet;
but a pulse that will not learn its ending:

slow, stubborn,
root braiding soil to story,
wind carrying what remains
of a language

we are still,
barely,

in time to hear.

About the Poet
David Anson Lee resides in Bellaire, Texas, United States.
Read the poet's biography and Wax Poetry and Art publications on David Anson Lee's Artist Page.

The Poet's Connection to Manitoba
Born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and raised in Manitoba, now lives and writes in Texas.

This poem is also featured in Poetry World #16, published in the Wax Poetry and Art Library.

Keywords: environmental memory, Indigenous ecology, climate grief

Previously published in Manitoba Poetry Magazine:
Hummingbird
by Louise Maksymetz

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