Aaron Schneider wins CBC Cape Breton poetry face-off

My friend, Aaron Schneider, has won the Cape Breton section of the CBC Radio One poetry face-off I mentioned in my posting about the Silver Dart weekend. Five poets were invited to write poems using "flight" as their inspiration. Five wonderful and very different poems emerged and were read to a live CBC Radio One audience, that then got to vote on their favourite poem. The poets, as listed on CBC's website, were:

Aaron Schneider, St. Ann's Bay
Joyce Rankin, Judique/Westmount
Katani Julian, Eskasoni
Mischif (Sandy MacEachern), Glace Bay
Shirley Christmas

Here's Aaron's poem, printed with his permission.

Bush Pilot
-- for Don Sheldon

You never killed anyone, yet walked away
from more ditched planes than anyone in Alaska,
because you flew where no one else would,
because you flew when no one else would.

The glaciers lay in the spaces between
the spread fingers of a granite hand,
ice spiked knuckles waiting
to see our stuff. The weather stank.

We had a picture of our mountain,
an idea of where it was,
but our choice of glaciers came down
to the only one we could see to land on.

We had flown a recon the day before
up a sunlit carpet of snow and crevassed ice
when you saw something move far below
and said, "look at this," rolled and dove,

aimed straight for the looming giant
Toklat grizzly, pulled up sharp above it,
as it reared and pawed the air, reached to fight
the roaring plane, not frightened, not running.

One by one you brought us in, six trips
between the white-outs, through windows
in low clouds with our heavy gear
and the big radio to call you back.

We climbed for days, a week, then two,
searched for a way to the shear icy tower --
inviolable, on another glacier -- bivouacked blind
where the wind sang, dug in on snow capped ridges,

tried to sleep through nightless summer storms,
climbed when it cleared. Got soaked climbing back
to camp in freezing rain, then two days more stuck
in tents, and we strung out the long dipole antennae.

You slipped in through the next patch of blue,
to the strip we flagged for your ski-wheeled SuperCub
and loaded me on. "We have a delivery on McKinley,"
you said, as we took off, "and it's not packed to drop."

We hummed into the glitter of the Alaska Range, McKinley's
buttress rising above a small flat glacier dropping to the south,
bound to the east by an icefall, to the west by a granite wall.
"Can you judge the snow -- how deep we'll sink if we land?"

you asked, as you banked left against the icefall, flew the narrow
space to the wall, left again and back circling until three climbers
appeared below and you put it down, skied up to them, pulled off
their drop, then threw off my pack and your survival gear.

The skis had sunk a foot in soft snow. "You stay here,
help push 'til I'm free, if it goes well I'll come back for you."
Two on each wing, we pushed, fell forward as you broke out
and raced for the edge, dropped, lifted, and circled back.

Heavier now, with only three to push, fully revved, we skied over the lip,
fell into the void, made lift, and rose thrumming in the crystalline air,
and I knew how much you loved this. "How much gas when both gauges
read empty"" I asked. "None," you smiled. I trusted you to ditch the plane,

but feared mosquitoes on a long slog out through boulders and bush,
or grizzly like the one we'd pissed off earlier. "Do we pass Huntington
on the way?" I asked, "friends there." "No," you said, but changed course,
saw them, standing in a notch, waving as we flew by dipping the wings.

We did land on the tarmac in Talkeetna, and taxied to the pumps to refuel.
"How much left?" I asked. "One minute," you said, and then, "Did you
climb your mountain? No? Awful to fail, isn't it?" Nearly broke, I hitched
rides south, five endless days, away from all that light in the north.

I rode with natives, who left me waiting at lonely roads to hidden enclaves,
and through the Yukon with a panicked senior, fleeing remoteness and the
Arctic Circle, as days wore down to dusk and finally to a place where night
could fall, and I wondered at how we could have flown so free from fear as

(it is believed) the soul flies out at death, freed from the gravity of living.

-- February 2009

Aaron is a writer, teacher and environmental activist. His poems have been published widely in poetry magazines, journals and anthologies in Canada, the US and Europe and have been read on CBC Radio. He has won several awards and prizes including the Word on the Street poetry readings sponsored by Atlantic Books Today, the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia prizes for the A Best Poetry Book in Manuscript in 1985, for Adult Poetry in 1984, and Honourable Mention for Short Fiction in 1995. He received a New York Creative Artists Public Service Program Poetry Fellowship in 1977. A selection of his poems, Wild Honey, was published in late 1998. Other works include CBC Radio Commentaries, the books Deforestation and Development in Canada and the Tropics, Selection Management of Private Woodlands in Nova Scotia: a Steward's Guide, numerous articles on environment and development issues and art, photography and theatre reviews for Arts Atlantic, Visual Arts News, The Halifax Herald, the Cape Breton Post, Inverness Oran, The Victoria Standard.