Category: Poems

• Poem a Day: 5

  I’m tired of this empire:
  tired of being mistress to its master,
  raw to its refined,
  spice to its substance,
  colour to its white,
  extra to its ordinary,
  outlier to its centre.
  I’m tired of its tongue
  upon my tongue.

  April 13, 2014

  ---

• Poem a Day: 4

  I don’t know how to pray.

  I once found a bible tucked away on a shelf in a backroom in our basement,
  and unzipped its black cover to
  sneak a few peeks. My father was taught
  by nuns, St. Aloysius,
  fish Fridays, communion, but
  only baptized us out of
  habit.

  Sundays he would pack sesame snaps, granola bars and juice boxes
  into brown paper bags,
  take us walking in marshland, meadow, forest,
  Elk Island, Hawrelark Park, Clifford E. Lee Nature
  Sanctuary, make us stop and wait while he thumbed well-worn pages of
  his plant id book, to the songs of
  chickadees. We’d drag our feet down aspen aisles, only drawn forwards
  by the promise of
  McDonald’s afterwards.

  He never taught us to sit still through mass

  but he taught us to be quiet,
  to sit with our backs to the hill and eyes on the river,
  to kneel beneath branches among pine needles and ladybugs,
  to stand still
  and stare up in awe at Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Orion.

  April 11, 2014

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• Poem a Day:3

  Asahi

  

  There are many ways to erase
  community.

  Remove baseball players from home
  base.
  Replace.
  Remove baseball diamond from park.
  Replace.

  Displace
  its grandmothers.

  Remove benches from park,
  bricks from walls.
  Replace.
  Misplace names.
  Forget their names.
  Forget their names.
  Forget their names.
  Rename.
  Assimilate.
  Replace.

  April 10, 2014

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• Poem a Day: 2

  Tomb Sweeping

  It is raining.
  I don’t know where the bones lie, but
  the salt water I swallow and
  the bright of white blossoms
  remind me that it’s time to sweep the ancestors’ tombs and
  give my love
  to the living.

  April 9, 2014

  ---

• Poem a Day: 1

  April is National Poetry Month. I’m a week late to the game of a poem a day, til the month of May, but better late than never. Here is my first poem.

  I am
  a floating lotus that’s forgotten
  it’s anchored by roots
  and bound by lily pad
  borders.

  I am not
  sure where to begin because I don’t even know
  what I’ve forgotten.

  April 7, 2014

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• In Relation to Land

  AFTER BLACK ROCK

  I slept through fits of fever

  stomach clutching stones
  head floating empty
  waking to wild wind through black
  hunger, without
  will or words

  (I did not think to kiss the stone)

  wondering what grief or poverty –
  famine, empire, and holy ghost –
  makes memorial out of big
  black
  rock, bluntly chiseled
  epitaph, no Celtic cross atop it?

  

  This St. Patrick’s Day, I’m wondering about the Irish in me. I’m a fourth generation Irish Canadian. I have absolutely no idea what this means. I have never celebrated Irish holidays and never been to Ireland. I’ve observed that all my relatives on this side of the family have thick hair, like going for long walks, and all enjoy ice cream. Beyond that, I have no clue what “our traditions” are, when the last time it was that someone in our family spoke Gaelic, and if it’s possible, or even desirable, to lay claim to an ancestry that I have no interaction with.

  Mostly, I wonder about our relationship to land. I wonder if my ancestors were indigenous to Ireland. I know they were Roman Catholic Irish, and may have been flax farmers, possibly from County Armagh or County Kerry. But I don’t know what they felt when they sailed from Ireland to Canada, never to return. Likely displaced by poverty and politics, and pulled across the sea by the promise of land, made available to them by the hands of the same empire that pushed them from their own homeland. I wonder if they carried sadness with them, fear, optimism, excitement, hope. If their descendants inherited homesickness, longing, loss, gratitude for the opportunity for new life in a new land, freedom.

  We know they arrived in Canada in 1847, during the potato famine, so were likely “famine emigrants”, refugees in a sense.

  Last summer, on a family visit to Montreal, I went searching for what I’d heard called the Black Rock Memorial.

  

  The Irish Commemorative Stone or Black Rock (Leacht Cuimhneachain Na Ngael) in Montreal stands in an unassuming place, at the entrance to Victoria Bridge, surrounded by four lanes of traffic.

  

  It approximately marks the centre of a cemetery, in an area known as Windmill Point, where 3,500-6,000 Irish immigrants who died in 1847 of typhus or “ship fever” were buried in mass graves. In 1859, workers constructing the Victoria Bridge, many of whom were of Irish descent, discovered the mass grave, and decided to erect the memorial.

  Each year at the end of May, the Montreal Irish-Canadian community hosts a walk from St. Gabriel’s church in Pointe St. Charles, to the stone to commemorate those lives that were lost. The neighbourhoods bordering the Lachine Canal, Point St. Charles and Griffintown began as a working class, Anglophone neighbourhoods, inhabited by many Irish, who worked on the Lachine Canal, or the Grand Trunk Railway or built the Victoria Bridge.

  

  I don’t know if my ancestors passed through this port. I don’t know if any of them lost family members to typhus. I don’t if they were strong, or lucky, or smart.

  I do know that their relationship to the lands they arrived on was one of homesteader, pioneer, settler, farmer.

  settler

  noun
  the settlers were ill-prepared for the severe winter ahead: colonist, colonizer, frontiersman, frontierswoman, pioneer, bushwhacker; immigrant, newcomer; historical homesteader. ANTONYMS native.

  

  The land they acquired was referred to as Lot 6, Concession 6, Ellice Township in Perth County, Ontario. The county was named after Perthshire, Scotland. This land was within the Huron Tract Purchase also known as the Huron Block. In 1827, 2.1 million acres of land was ceded by the Anishinaabe of Kettle and Stony Point to the British Crown, with the signing of the Huron Tract Treaty, Crown Treaty 29. Over a 9 year period, the British met in council with the Chippewa of the region to discuss acquisition of the land.  In return the Chippewas of Chenail Ecarte (Walpole Island), River St. Clair (Sarnia) and River Aux Sauble (Kettle and Stony Point) were granted a perpetual annuity. Four reserves, comprising less than 1 per cent of the land, were reserved out of the cession in locations chosen by the Chippewas (Ipperwash Commission of Inquiry, Historical Background). The Huron Tract was purchased by the Canada Company, an agent of the British government, to be distributed to colonial settlers of Upper Canada. John Galt, the founding member of the Canada Company, originally envisioned the settlement of the Huron Tract as an agricultural experiment.

  

  For the next several generations, my family made their homes in and around Stratford, Ontario, on the Avon River, named after Shakespeare’s hometown. They were farmers, teachers, and small business people. They lived on a farm, and then later in brick houses they had built on property they owned. Only in the last generation have they left the region to migrate west within Canada, now owning and renting homes in cities in Ontario, Alberta and BC.

  

  settle
  verb

  1 he settled in Otsego County: make one’s home in, set up home in, take up residence in, put down roots in, establish oneself in; live in, move to, emigrate to.
  2 immigrants settled much of Australia: colonize, occupy, inhabit, people, populate.
  3 Catherine settled down to her work: apply oneself to, get down to, set about, attack; concentrate on, focus on, devote oneself to.
  4 the class wouldn’t settle down : calm down, quiet down, be quiet, be still; informal shut up.
  5 a brandy will settle your nerves: calm, quiet; soothe, pacify, quell; sedate, tranquilize; Brit. quieten. ANTONYMS agitate, disturb.
  6 he settled into an armchair: sit down, seat oneself, install oneself, ensconce oneself, plant oneself; informal park oneself, plunk oneself.
  7 a butterfly settled on the flower: land, come to rest, alight, descend, perch; archaic light.
  8 when the stirring stops, the sediment settles: sink, subside, fall, gravitate. ANTONYMS rise.

  There is so much I don’t know, and I welcome feedback, information and dialogue. I am working to understand what it means to have been born and raised on land in Treaty 6 Territory, and to now be living and studying on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Skwxwú7mesh, Xwméthkwyiem and Tsleil-Waututh nations.

  I hope that if there is any point in knowing where one comes from, and if it is possible to carry anything in me that is Irish, it is to be able to grasp onto a seed of empathy. A seed that can grow into a commitment to stand with those who have been, and continue to be, displaced or dispossessed of the lands they call home, be it in the name of city building or resource extraction. I hope it can grow into an awareness of how I am complicit in displacing or dispossessing others of their homes.  I hope that I can grow to understand what it means to live in relation with this land upon which I am a guest.

  March 17, 2014

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• This Lack of Words (This Daughter’s Tongue)

  There are things unspoken between us.

  This lack of words becomes a gap
  becomes a black hole of
  language, becomes a complicated kind of
  rage that gets deposited in the backrooms of our
  brains and the cavities of our hearts.

  This daughter’s tongue tries to find the words but they stick
  in her teeth like bits of meat
  and she hasn’t got a toothpick.
  She tries to find the words but they fall from her lips
  like grains of rice
  and she’s not sure how to unfold this language of the gut
  with her language of the brain.

  This daughter’s tongue gets stuck
  on the tones of this sing-song language,
  this language of puns and wordplay, of homonyms and homophones, of
  synonyms, proverbs, ancient poems, and double and triple entendres
  that she’ll never ever get
  because it takes a lifetime of living wrapped
  in its context, and syntax and rhythm,
  in its teahouses, markets and temples
  to know it
  in throat and stomach and bones.

  This daughter’s tongue does not speak
  her mother’s mother tongue,
  or her father’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother tongue.
  Not really. She
  has tried, tries, is trying, will try.
  Why? Why try to speak a language not required in day-to-day life?
  A language with no power, no future, no hype?
  Why?

  Because she needs to be able to taste
  the food that makes her heart and stomach fly.
  Because she needs to know what the old books
  teach and the poets speak and the revolutionaries preached.
  She needs to know the names of rivers and mountains and cities
  that she may never see. She wants to know
  what the grandfathers laugh about under the trees and
  the grandmothers yell from their balconies.

  So, she goes looking for this language.
  She looks in rice-cooker kitchens
  in railroad ties and shipping yards
  in the side-streets of nation
  and alleyways of empire.

  She looks for it in the throats of colonies, the colonized, and the colonizers.
  In the backroads, the countrysides, the islands and the coastlines.

  She looks in all those places where we grew up speaking
  differently, in the hearts of us who come seeking
  languages that we think we ought to speak
  as if these languages will fix a crack in a tongue
  a gap in a lung
  a shortage of spirit
  a crooked tooth, a split lip
  as if
  these language will tune our hearts
  and sync us to some universal rhythm that’s been playing all this time
  (all we had to was un-mute the volume and we wouldn’t have been dancing on the off beat).

  But after all this lacking and looking, she comes to see
  that this language is not inherited, it’s not inherent.
  It has to be learned. It’s not a talisman, nor a trinket or a party trick.
  Not some chip you can stick in your brains and just press play.
  There is no quick way.
  It has to be learned.

  She comes to see that maybe it’s not about this language alone.
  Maybe this language won’t fix anything
  until borders and bloodlines become irrelevant.
  Until we stop saying what we are not, and what we cannot
  and start saying what we are
  what we can
  and what we will.

  Because maybe it’s about learning
  to speak with the tongue and from
  the heart, which takes starting
  from somewhere
  that’s so hard to get to, but feels so familiar.

  Learning to speak
  is like learning to eat.
  It takes tuning taste buds to different frequencies,
  rolling vowels like melon seeds
  from the backs of our mouths, out over our teeth
  to send them flying out into the world.
  It takes courage, see,
  because like anything else, this
  language is learned,
  and nothing is inherent
  and our survival depends on learning to speak with our tongues and from our hearts, and maybe if
  we speak, our stories will be the stop gaps
  in the black holes
  left by what’s unspoken between us.
  So that,
  instead of wandering under this open sky
  with no roadmap to orient by
  as though we’re always arriving for the first time,

  these stories will give us our bearings.

  March 5, 2014

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• Untitled

  

  Mornings, under mist
  these mountains are mum
  lips pressed tight,
  guardians of secrets

  til I catch them
  smiling against sunset
  twin sisters, speak,
  guardians of peace

  then across water, I see
  two lion-dogs yawn
  one mouth open and
  one mouth closed
  mother and father and
  beginning and end,
  guardians of entrances

  parallel lines meet

  and I know why
  this place feels old like home.

  ~~~

  “The Two Sisters” in The Legends of Vancouver, 
  E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake,  1911.

  You can see them as you look towards the north and the west, where the dream-hills swim into the sky amid the ever- drifting clouds of pearl and grey. They catch the earliest hint of sunrise, they hold the last colour of sunset. Twin mountains they are, lifting their twin peaks above the fairest city in all Canada, and known throughout the British Empire as “The Lions of Vancouver”.

  Sometimes the smoke of forest fires blurs them until they gleam like opals in a purple atmosphere, too beautiful for words to paint. Sometimes the slanting rains festoon scarves of of mist about their crests, and the peaks fade into shadowy outlines, melting, melting, forever melting into the distances. But for most days in the year the sun circles the twin glories with a sweep of gold. The moon washes them with a torrent of silver.

  Oftentimes, when the city is shrouded in rain, the sun yellows their snows to a deep orange; but through sun and shadow they stand immovable, smiling westward above the waters of the restless Pacific, eastward above the superb beauty of the Capilano Canyon. But the Indian tribes do not know these peaks as “The Lions.” Even the chief whose feet have so recently wandered to the Happy Hunting Grounds never heard the name given them until I mentioned it to him one dreamy August day, as together we followed the trail leading to the canyon.

  He seemed so surprised at the name that I mentioned the reason it had been applied to them, asking him if he recalled the Landseer Lions in Trafalgar Square. Yes, he remembered those splendid sculptures, and his quick eye saw the resemblance instantly. It appeared to please him, and his fine face expressed the haunting memories of the faraway roar of Old London.

  But the “call of the blood” was stronger, and presently he referred to the Indian legend of those peaks – a legend that I have reason to believe is absolutely unknown to the thousands of Palefaces who look upon “The Lions” daily, without the love for them that is in the Indian heart, without knowledge of the secret of “The Two Sisters.”

  The legend was intensely fascinating as it left his lips in the quaint broken English that is never so dulcet as when it slips from an Indian tongue. His inimitable gestures, strong, graceful, comprehensive, were like a perfectly chosen frame embracing a delicate painting, and his brooding eyes were as the light in which the picture hung.

  “Many thousands of years ago,” he began, “there were no twin peaks like sentinels’guarding the outposts of this sunset coast. They were placed there long after the first creation, when the Sagalie Tyee moulded the mountains, and patterned the mighty rivers where the salmon run, because of His love for His Indian children, and His wisdom for their necessities. In those times there were many and mighty Indian tribes along the Pacific – in the mountain ranges, at the shores and sources of the great Fraser River. Indian Law ruled the land. Indian customs prevailed. Indian beliefs were regarded.

  “Those were the legend-making ages when great things occurred to make the traditions we repeat to our children today. Perhaps the greatest of these traditions is the story of ‘The Two Sisters,’ for they are known to us as ‘The Chief’s Daughters,’ and to them we owe the Great Peace in which we live, and have lived for many countless moons.

  “There is an ancient custom amongst the coast tribes that, when our daughters step from childhood into the great world of womanhood, the occasion must be made one of extreme rejoicing. The being who possesses the possibility of some day mothering a man-child, a warrior, a brave, receives much consideration in most nations; but to us, the Sunset tribes, she is honoured above all people.

  “The parents usually give a great potlatch, and a feast that lasts many days. The entire tribe and the surrounding tribes are bidden to this festival. More than that, sometimes when a great Tyee celebrates for his daughter, the tribes from far up the coast, from the distant north, from inland, from the island, from the Cariboo country, are gathered as guests to the feast.

  “During these days of rejoicing the girl is placed in a high seat, an exalted position, for is she not marriageable? And does not marriage mean motherhood? And does not motherhood mean a vaster nation of brave sons and of gentle daughters, who, in their turn, will give us sons and daughters of their own?

  “But it was many thousands of years ago that a great Tyee had two daughters that grew to womanhood at the same springtime, when the first great run of salmon thronged the rivers, and the ollallie bushes were heavy with blossoms.

  “These two daughters were young, lovable and oh! very beautiful. Their father, the great Tyee, prepared to make a feast such as the Coast had never seen. There were to be days and days of rejoicing, the people were to come for many leagues, were to bring gifts to the girls and to receive gifts of great value from the chief, and hospitality was to reign as long as pleasuring feet could dance, and enjoying lips could laugh, and mouths partake of the excellence of the chief’s fish, game, and olallies.

  “The only shadow on the joy of it all was war, for the tribe of the great Tyee was at war with the Upper Coast Indians, those who lived north, near what is named by the Paleface as the port of Prince Rupert. Giant war canoes slipped along the entire coast, war-parties paddled up and down, war-songs broke the silences of the nights, hatred, vengeance, strife, horror festered everywhere like sores on the surface of the earth.

  “But the great Tyee, after warring for weeks, turned and laughed at the battled and the bloodshed, for he had been victor in every encounter, and he could well afford to leave the strife for a brief week and feast in his daughters’ honour, not permit any mere enemy to come between him and the traditions of his race and household. So he turned insultingly deaf ears to their war cries; he ignored with arrogant indifference their paddle-dips that encroached within his own coast water; and he prepared, as a great Tyee should, to royally entertain his tribesmen in honour of his daughters.

  “But seven suns before the great feast, these two maidens came before him, hand clasped in hand.

  “‘Oh! our father,’ they said, ‘may we speak?’

  “‘Speak, my daughters, my girls with the eyes of April, the hearts of June”‘ (early spring and early summer would be the more accurate Indian phrasing).

  “‘Some day, oh! our father, we may mother a man-child, who may grow to bejust such a powerful Tyee as you are, and for this honour that may some day be ours we have come to crave a favour of you – you, Oh! our father.’

  “‘It is your privilege at this celebration to receive any favour your hearts may wish,’ he replied graciously, placing his fingers beneath their girlish chins. ‘The favour is yours before you ask it, my daughters.’

  “‘Will you, for our sakes, invite the great northern hostile tribe – the tribe you war upon – to this, our feast?’ they asked fearlessly.

  “‘To a peaceful feast, a feast in the honour of women?’ he exclaimed incredulously.

  “‘So we desire it,’ they answered.

  “‘And so shall it be,’ he declared. ‘I can deny you nothing this day, and some time you may bear sons to bless this peace you have asked, and to bless their mother’s sire for granting it.’ Then he turned to all the young men of the tribe and commanded: ‘Build fires at sunset on all the coast headlands – fires of welcome. Man your canoes and face the north, greet the enemy, and tell them that I, the Tyee of the Capilanos, ask – no, command – that they join me for a great feast in honour of my two daughters.’

  “And when the northern tribe got this invitation they flocked down the coast to this feast of a Great Peace. They brought their women and their children; they brought game and fish, gold and white stone beads, baskets and carven ladles, and wonderful woven blankets to lay at the feet of their now acknowledged ruler, the great Tyee. And he, in turn, gave such a potlatch that nothing but tradition can vie with it. There were long, glad days of joyousness, long, pleasurable nights of dancing and camp-fires, and vast quantities of food.

  “The war-canoes were emptied of their deadly weapons and filled with the daily catch of salmon. The hostile war songs ceased, and in their place was heard the soft shuffle of dancing feet, the singing voices of women, the play-games of the children of two powerful tribes which had been until now ancient enemies, for a great and lasting brotherhood was sealed between them – their war songs were ended forever.

  “Then the Sagalie Tyee smiled on His Indian children: ‘I will make these young-eyed maidens immortal,’ He said. In the cup of His hands He lifted the chief’s two daughters and set them forever in a high place, for they had borne two offspring – Peace and Brotherhood – each of which is now a great Tyee ruling this land.

  “And on the mountain crest the chief’s daughters can be seen wrapped in the suns, the snows, the stars of all seasons, for they have stood in this high place for thousands of years, and will stand for thousands of years to come, guarding the peace of the Pacific Coast and the quiet of the Capilano Canyon.”

  This is the Indian legend of “The Lions of Vancouver” as I had it from one who will tell me no more the traditions of his people.

  January 26, 2014

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• A Day with David Wong

  I am currently a student in the Master of Arts in Planning at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning. As grad students, we sift through long-winded academic and technical writing – much of it important, but much of it difficult to communicate back out to the world. I worry that as I step up onto the “professional ladder”, as a planner, I will move further away from reality, from lived experience, and community wisdom. So, I would like to begin try to communicate what I am learning in planning school, in an accessible, graphic way. Inspired by a day of shadowing Vancouver architect, David Wong, I attempted to tell the story of the day we spent together in comic-form.

  David Wong is an architect, who calls himself an urban ecologist. He recently launched his first graphic novel, Escape to Gold Mountain, a graphic history of the Chinese in North America, published by Arsenal Pulp Press. He was a recipient of a 2012 Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in recognition of his professional work and volunteer efforts to champion environmental causes and green design, and was inducted as an Honorary Witness by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada on September 18, 2013. Most recently, he has been leading a community effort to restore the Ming Sun Benevolent Society’s building in Vancouver’s historic Japantown, at 439 Powell Street. It was truly an honour and a privilege to spend a day with David.

  The sum of all these things he does, in my mind, is planning.

  
  

  January 12, 2014

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• Migrant

  I.

  Intrepid travelers,
  calibrated to the sun
  carrying nothing but the weight of wings
  what is it like to have no map,
  to trust the lines
  of land beneath you,
  knowing it will take four life-times,
  to get there and back?

  II.

  I am a daughter of migration
  of peasants and poverty and politics
  and famine and ships
  and shorelines
  and shorelines and shorelines
  and plough-lines
  in land passed through the hands of empire
  like top-hats and opium and tea.

  I am the colour of islands
  and linen and peatlands and moss
  and rice fields and fish skin and copper and silk
  of sea of sky of earth
  of rock of rock of rock.

  I am made of
  China
  like porcelain
  like filigree
  like bird-bone
  like ice
  like sorrow
  like longing
  like home.

  I am made of brick
  like foundation
  like clay
  like grit
  like sweat
  like walls
  like strength
  like home.

  I am tombolo,
  stretched between outcrops
  floating lotus
  spider spun lines of latitude
  I am cloth
  woven from
  blood-lines
  and life-lines
  and laugh-lines
  and story-lines.

  III.

  They call me a wanderer,
  free spirit.

  I’ll take that.
  

  I’ve never been good at seeing borders,
  at following the most direct path
  from A to B,
  nor reading maps,
  let alone being able to unfold them,
  re-fold them, neatly.

  Don’t ask me to tell you where I’m going.
  Don’t ask me to care less
  to carry less
  to let go of the muscle memory of migration
  at the base of my neck.

  I fear a future of
  forever facing forward,
  forehead forgetting that the passing
  of time is told by the breaths
  of mitochondria and the
  birth of cells.

  It seems implausible to believe that
  I will find the sea
  but I remember that these
  walls too once had
  leaves.

  IV.

  I get restless before a snowfall
  start to unfold wings
  slip swiftly into skin
  grow silver scales.

  Call it wind,
  call it magnetism, call it faith.
  Call me sockeye, call me monarch,
  call me snow goose, call me caribou.
  Call me flighty, call me fickle, call me vagrant

  but don’t ask me to stay.

  I carry no allegiance
  to territory or flag or creed
  carry nothing
  but the weight of wings
  nothing but the muscle memory of migration.
  

  I leave this place,
  turn face to sea, to sky, to earth, to sun

  and return.

  * * *

  These poems were inspired partly by stories about the way that monarch butterflies born in Canada and the United States migrate nearly 5,000 km to Mexico, and navigate by orienting themselves towards the sun, and how their migration spans 4 generations, as well as why their migration may be endangered.

  It was also inspired by the artist-led campaign to reform American immigration policy, Migration is Beautiful, as well as reflections on the way migration is wrapped up in my personal and family histories.

  December 28, 2013

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