Ottawa Snapshot, Easter Week-End, 2010

Mid-July weather has enraptured
Ottawa on Easter Week-end 2010.
Heat and blazing sun sending people
into the outdoors as never before in April.
Out with the baby strollers, flashy
convertibles, motorcycles, bicycles
and tandems; motorized wheelchairs.

Britannia Beach is packed with sun
worshippers, swim-suit clad tossing
beach balls, throwing Frisbees, walking
their overheated dogs, anointing children's
limbs with sunblock, while gulls
screech derisively and sweep overhead.

Canada geese waddle along, pecking
the greensward beside the sparkling
Ottawa river, and mallards bob and
bask along in the slow currents, not
far from the Remi rapids, famed and
framed in early Canadian woodcuts.

On Parliament Hill, visitors swarm
the wide green spaces, snapping photos
and posing for their personal posterity.
Tourists fling themselves into the lively
atmosphere at Byward Market, sitting
prettily at outdoor cafes, eschewing
the Capital's capacious museum interiors.

A plenitude of multifarious peoples
from everywhere on Earth, now Canadian,
revel in the release from winter's hard
place, and lend themselves to the carnival
of celebration; the divinity of one arisen
from that dark place humankind so fears;

the divinely eternal mechanistic plans
of Mother Nature rescuing all her creatures
from wintry chill to the awakening of spring.