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In honour of "Remembrance Week," Maria Meindl, author of Outside the Box, is today's guest blogger.
Prayer at Queen and Yonge
What was he thinking,
The young soldier with the empty sleeve
And one foot off,
Watching the long, noisy Conga line
That snaked down Yonge Street?
You couldn't tell by his eyes.
They were neither interested
Nor excited –
A little tired, maybe,
And sad, surely,
But not interested.
He stood in a safe doorway
And seemed more alone
Than anyone ought to be
On a day of celebration.
And yet, no one ventured to say to him,
“How is it with you …?
What's the good word, Buddy?”
What he carried in his heart
Was his own quiet business.
If the shell that took his arm and foot
Also took his best friend
Well… your guess was as good as mine.
There were no cheers left in his heart
That much was apparent.
If by any chance he was toting up
What HE had paid for This Day
With his own body
I pray God, that for all the years of his life
He will find it a fair exchange.
© Mona McTavish Gould
I came across this poem while assembling a website for my grandmother’s unpublished poetry. Mona McTavish Gould is best known for “This Was My Brother,” written after the Canadian raid on Dieppe. It was immediately taken up by newspapers across the country, and is still reprinted in schoolbooks and anthologies.
Mona was a prolific writer, though. She began freelancing at the age of eleven, publishing poems stories in local newspapers throughout Ontario. During World War Two, she moved to Toronto, where she worked for MacLaren Advertising and later for the Red Cross. She published three books of poetry during this time. In the 1950s she had three radio programs on CKEY, Listen Ladies, Be My Guest and Carousel.
“Prayer at Queen and Yonge” was among the thousands (yes, thousands) of drafts she kept, and donated to the University of Toronto before her death in 1999. It is hard to say what happened to the poem. Maybe it was published and she kept no record of where. However, I suspect she never sent it out.
As I discovered in sorting her papers, my grandmother had been discouraged from expressing her true feelings about war and its aftermath. (I hasten to add that she never suggested Canada stay out of World War Two. Rather, she only sought to be honest about its impact.)
In 1939, Mona submitted a poem called “A Woman Looks on War” to The Montrealer, a monthly magazine which published a lot of her work. It expressed the anxiety of a mother with a son approaching draftable age. In his rejection letter, the editor wrote “… the newspapers and the magazines of Canada must do everything they can to ‘sell’ the war to Canadians.”
How did she cope with this? The short answer is, I don’t know. Despite growing up as Mona’s confidante, despite having spent five years among her papers and another six writing her biography, she remained opaque to me. I do know that she never spoke openly in the growing debates on whether Dieppe had been worthwhile. She never mentioned her feelings about “A Woman Looks on War,” either.
However, she always made a big deal of Remembrance Day. This was partially because it placed her back in the eye of a public which had seemingly turned its back on her. By the time I was growing up, this woman whose face had once appeared on billboards was a virtual unknown. On Remembrance Day she was called upon to speak to school groups and would often receive calls to reprint the poem or use it in services. Mona thrived on attention, and for her, Remembrance Day put the world in order again.
But Mona also saw the day as a way at once to commemorate the losses of war, and to prevent it in future. “Make Words Not War” was the slogan she coined for school groups.
“A Woman Looks on War” was eventually published, by Gossip Magazine, in the 1969. Mona had never taken an outright stand in stating her true feelings; she just waited quietly until public sentiments caught up with her. Maybe, sixty-five years after it was written, we’re also ready for “Prayer at Queen and Yonge.”
Mona’s biography, Outside the Box: The Life and Legacy of Mona Gould, the Grandmother I Thought I Knew was published from McGill Queen’s University Press in September. Her three books of poetry are available for free download from Project Gutenberg.
Maria will be reading and signing books at Type Books, 427 Spadina Rd on Saturday, November 12th. Read Maria's blog post about the event here.
To learn more about Outside the Box, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
* Prayer at Queen and Yonge is covered by a Creative Commons Canada Attribution No-Derivatives Licence. It may be shared freely, but please quote accurately and acknowledge the author each time the poem is used.
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