Travel

From: Incantation: Memory of Water

Tonight, a strand of my great-grandmother’s hair

sashes an amber beer bottle discarded by a tourist.

 

A white thread of my grandmother’s baptismal robe

is a bangle on a wrist of kelp

waving its arm on St. Phillip’s eastern coast.

 

The ocean does not hunger

but its mouths gape and hold, like errant flecks

of...

Brandon Wint
1988

Ideas of Home

              i

 

Winter has landed; my boot bucks on a stone

surrounded by snow; I swear, I murmur

Oracabessa. “The rock” is what I call home,

all islanders do, and I’m in blessed Ann Arbour,

mainland, where I found safe harbour under

green sea of trees now becalmed, frosted.

Ideas of Oracabessa propel me forward

...

Lorna Goodison

Rejected Text for a Tourist Brochure

“I saw my land in the morning

and O but she was fair”

- M.G. Smith, “Jamaica” (1938)

 

I

 

Come see my land

 

Come see my land

before the particles of busy fires ascend;

before the rivers descend underground;

before coffee plantations

grind the mountains into...

Olive Senior

Catastrophe That Nearly Brought Down a Plane

After late-night Li Bo,

on a plane to Houston, out of sheer intumescence

I begin unravelling a sickness bag—

starting with the wired throat,

then the pleated sides, then bottom.

My finger trapezing through the waxed paper

feels like a tall-masted skiff – almost Odysseus

slicing Lake Ontario: placid like an eye

that has...

Sabyasachi Nag

The Windrush

Departing from Kingston, Jamaica, the British ship Empire Windrush

brought one of the first large groups of postwar Caribbean immigrants to

London in 1948

 

Dem did sey she pregnance

Cum a sea full a mi

Weighing har down eena har shoe dem

Dresses, coco, mangoes an baggy an arl

 

Dem...

Valerie Mason-John

Dear Diaspora Child

it's okay if you only learned about your culture from Google

 

it's okay if you only read your language at the public library

 

it's okay if you need books to know your ancestral recipes

 

it's okay if you've never even set foot on the soil of your people

 

it's okay if your...

Cicely Belle Blain
1993

I saw a perfect tree today

I saw a perfect tree today

From my cabin bed on a Via Rail train 

Through the North of Ontario

I saw a perfect tree today

It was tall and thin and scraggly and prim

Then I saw another just as perfect

Short and sturdy with branches and brambles 

And then another with a rugged fat trunk

Older than the rest, but just as...

Lillian Allen

Packing for the Future: Instructions

Take the thickest socks.

Wherever you're going

you'll have to walk.

 

There may be water.

There may be stones.

There may be high places

you cannot go without

the hope socks bring you,

the way they hold you

to the earth.

 

At least one pair must be new,

must be blue as a wish...

Lorna Crozier
b. 1948

New Year's

If you want to travel run

around the neighbourhood with an empty

suitcase in hand. At least once, full circle.

Wear yellow underwear

for the 31st, lest fortune oversee your cup

as she pours. Yes, thank you. I too wish you excitement

& wealth in the New Year.

Mostly, I hope you get

through tomorrow, and then the day...

Nicole Lachat

people arrived

people arrived from portugal. people arrived from africa. people arrived from

india. people arrived from england. people arrived from china. people

predated arrival. people fled predation. people were arrayed. people populated.

whips patterned rays into people. people arose. people rayed outward to

toronto, london, boo york. people raided people. people...

Kaie Kellough
1975 -

Kome's Story

for auntie nagasaki

it's the same story

told again & again

 

the modulations

& the machinations

 

the maudlin

& the dream

 

schemes & data

a million documents

 

& a single story

kome's

 

she said she...

Roy Miki
b. 1942

Northern Light

Stepping off the plane in Whitehorse

the last thing I expect to feel

is home

not quite alone

but close enough

here in this great black north.

As we drive away from the airport

Chris points out the window

That's Antoinette's, Caribbean food

if you're feeling in need of a pick-me-up.

She's from Tobago....

Jillian Christmas

Turtle Island Poem Number Fourteen

once i left turtle island and i

rejoined la and doubleU and see

to savai‘i on a hunting trip

on the fairy from upolu

la picked up a day trick

blew him during lunch

on the beach under a tree

in front of some australian girls

and an old couple from germany

who politely ignored us

while doubleU and see and...

Dan Taulapapa McMullin

from “Road Shoulders”

power lines held by birds

of prey the hostile expanse above

 

ditches teeming floral invasive

wayside fleurs

 

late summer the shoulder sang

 

holds breeze by

the course of the drive

 

ravelling winds furl sparse treetops

 

semi-trailers startle traffic to attention

...

Cecily Nicholson
b. 1974

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

 

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d

Greatly, have suffer’d...

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1809-1892

Two Hours on the Train

During two hours on the train

I rerun the film of my life

Two minutes per year on average

Half an hour for childhood

Another half-hour for prison

Love, books, wandering

take up the rest

the hand of my companion

gradually melts into mine

and her head on my shoulder

is as light as a dove

When we...

Abdellatif Laâbi
b. 1942

Illegalese: Floodgate Dub

(for the Chinese maroons, British Columbia, 1999–2001)

 

if you arrive in the belly of a rusting imagination, there are grounds to

outlaw you. but Canada is a remix B-side chorus in the globalization

loop: a sampled track of “back home”-desiring, “old days”-admiring,

democracy-dreaming, racism-reaping homesickness that even

...

Wayde Compton
b. 1972

The Novel As Manuscript

An ars poetica

 

 

I remember the death, in Russia,

of postage stamps

like immense museum masterpieces

patchwork

wrapped in linen, tea stained,

with hemp for strapping...

 

these colored stamps designed for foreign places

were even printed during famine—

so when they vanished...

Norman Dubie
b. 1945

Poem For Duncan Campbell Scott

(Canadian poet who “had a long and distinguished career

in the Department of lndian Affairs, retiring in 1932.”

The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse)

 

Who is this black coat and tie?

Christian severity etched in the lines

he draws from his mouth. Clearly a noble man

who believes in work and mission. See

how he rises from...

Armand Garnet Ruffo

Hotel Centrale, Rotterdam

I am awake between stiff

sheets tonight in room thirty

four, listening to the heat

tick through the radiator,

seeing a television

pour out news of the war

the war in the air, the war

in the Gulf. The walls vibrate

with video light. This is

no room for sleep anymore.

 

There is no room for...

Daniel David Moses
b. 1952

Kay in Summer

Someone waiting in the lobby of a Hotel Imperial amid

the spaciousness tourists and peeling gold leaf

might see it all as too hesitant for truth

Might think for a moment   about the art in scattering

too solidly carved tables   crowding too many dreams

before dim Victorian...

Claire Harris
1937-2018

World Town

Entirely windless, today’s sea; of these waters’ many names

the best seemed “field-of-pearl-leaves,” for it smelled like the air

in the house he built entirely of doors: pink school door,

gold of the burnt hotel, two old church blues, the abandoned

bank’s steel doors singular and immovably wedged over

the family’s heads though as with everything...

Shane Book

71. Song for a Silent Treatment.

I told her, in plain language, how I felt.

And by that I mean I mumbled a poorly

paraphrased and already cryptic passage

from one of Yeats’s later poems.

 

When she asked, “What was that?” I said, “Nothing.

Nothing. It doesn't matter.” It mattered,

of course. “Ma vie est usée. Allons, feignons ... ” 

On second...

David McGimpsey
b. 1962

From Red Doc

GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /

yes / I do vaguely

/ you never liked

him / bit of a

rebel / so you

said / he’s the

one wore lizard

pants and

 

...

Anne Carson
b. 1950

Interesting People of Newfoundland

Newfoundland is, or was, full of interesting people.

Like Larry, who would make a fool of himself on street corners

for a nickel. There was the Russian who called himself

the Grand Duke, and who was said to be a real duke from somewhere,

...

John Ashbery
1927 - 2017

When Winter Comes

Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke,

And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena,

And the skid-roads blind, and never a look

Of the Coast Range blue over Malaspina,

And west winds keener

Than jack-knife blades,

And rocks grown greener

With the long drip-drip from the cedar shades

On the drenched deep soil where the footsteps...

Marjorie Pickthall
1883-1922

Sweet Like a Crow

For Hetti Corea, 8 years old

 

‘The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical

people in the world. It would be quite impossible to have

less sense of...

Michael Ondaatje
b. 1943

The New Experience

I was ready for a new experience.

All the old ones had burned out.

 

They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside

And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields.

 

...

Suzanne Buffam
b. 1972

Pale Blue Cover

In the middle of the night Matt would fly to Vancouver so he could take a walk on the sea wall the next day, then go home.

Wouldnt tell anyone, no telephone call, just run a scene through his peculiar Ontario head, no snow on that beach.

No one can imagine Matt teaching religion at...

George Bowering
b. 1935

The Men That Don’t Fit In

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,

A race that can’t stay still;

So they break the hearts of kith and kin,

And they roam the world at will.

They range the field and they rove the flood,

And they climb the mountain’s crest;

Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,

...

Robert W. Service
1874-1958

En Route

The train has stopped for no apparent reason

In the wilds;

A frozen lake is level and fretted over

With rippled wind lines;

The sun is burning in the South; the season

Is winter trembling at a touch of spring.

A little hill with birches and a ring

Of cedars — all so still, so pure with snow —

It seems a tiny landscape in...

Duncan Campbell Scott
1862-1947

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

After Li Po

 

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.   

And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:

...

Ezra Pound
1885-1972

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

...

Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as...

Robert Frost
1874-1963

Journey of the Magi

“A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.”

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,...

T. S. Eliot
1888-1965

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

The tide rises, the tide falls,

The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;

Along the sea-sands damp and brown

The traveller hastens toward the town,

And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,

But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;

The little waves, with their soft, white...

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1807-1882

Kubla Khan

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772-1834