Poetic license

Poetry is beauty, and beauty is truth.

Or is it truth is beauty?

Sumpin' like that.

Anyway... besides the stirring and ever-so-Irish Rebel Ship, another piece of nationalist art makes its debut in this 59th Anniversary of Confederation season:

April the first, nineteen forty-nine
Was a day that I’ll soon not forget.
The radio blared that the “terms” had been signed,
Filling Grandfather’s heart with regret.

Must be beauty=truth, after all. In this case, the truth about the unusual properties of the universe that obtained in Newfoundland in 1949.

In pretty well the rest of the known universe, in all other epochs, electromagnetic radiation, including light and radio waves, travels at around 186,000 miles per second.

But there, and then, radio waves travelled at a much, much slower pace.

They would have had to, if the news that the “terms” had been signed only blared over the radio on April the first, nineteen forty-nine — the signing ceremony itself had taken place 111 days earlier on December 11, 1948.