Fred Cogswell: The Many-Dimensioned Self

by Tony Tremblay

Ode to Fredericton

White are your housetops, white too your vaulted elmsThat make your stately streets long aisles of prayer,And white your thirteen spires that point your GodWho reigns afar in pure and whiter air,And white the dome of your democracy-The snow has pitied you and made you fair,O snow-washed city of cold, white Christians,So white you will not cut a black man's hair.

From Descent from Eden. Reprinted with permission of Kathleen Forsythe, Cogswell's literary executor. Back to Selected Poems