Tuesday poem #631 : Fiona Tinwei Lam : Gift

Dedicated to Bunjiro and Kimi Uyeda and family

“1935-August… 1000 young cherry trees are donated to [the Vancouver Park] Board by Mr. and Mrs Uyeda. These are the first in the city and will be planted-out when more mature and funds available.”  –R. Mike Steele, The First 100 Years: An Illustrated Celebration

“In April 1942, three months after the Uyeda family had been “removed” from Vancouver, seven hundred of their [1000] donated cherry trees were planted out ….” – Nina Shoroplova, A Legacy of Trees: Purposeful Wandering in Vancouver’s Stanley Park

 

I search among the most venerable,
burly trunks, gnarled branches offering delicate
pink and white profusions to the sky.

Does even one remain
from your thousandfold gift?

No longer festooning Cambie Boulevard.
No longer amid the sonnet of trees petalling
Shakespeare’s Garden into spring.

Not among grafted cultivars ornamenting
park pathways toward the ‘Ojochin’s’

rivering arms, where the fluted pillar
of the Japanese Canadian War Memorial rises high,
its lantern’s flame extinguished

in 1942: whole neighbourhoods gutted, erased–
schools, churches, factories, farms.

Uprooted to an Exclusion Zone ghost town,
your Dunbar home and downtown business seized,
bolts of silk unraveling in others’ hands,

you would never see Vancouver
blossom with your thousand trees.

Pale pink petals flutter
over palimpsests. Mirage of shimmering
groves in a could have been city.

What survives?
Returns?

By the causeway, a quartet
of ‘Somei-yoshino,’ ancient companions,
moss-brocaded, scarred and scabbed,

anchored by their own deep roots,
can still remember to bloom.

And decades later,
a granddaughter—Sakura songs
from a once-banished branch.

 

Note:  The Uyeda family were well-established local business owners and philanthropists, owning and running a fabric store in downtown Vancouver. The majority of their 1000 donated cherry trees were not planted until 1942 because of labour shortages and financial constraints experienced during the Depression. Three months before the trees were planted, however, the family was forcibly relocated, interned and dispossessed. 22,000 Japanese Canadians were incarcerated during World War II. After being forcibly relocated to Kaslo, the Uyeda family moved to Montreal after the war. One of the Uyeda family’s granddaughters, acclaimed composer, Leslie Uyeda, eventually moved from Montreal to Vancouver to live and work.  She hadn’t known that any of her grandparents’ donated trees were still alive. Author and tree expert, Nina Shoroplova did some sleuthing and discovered the four remaining trees near the Stanley Park Causeway.  The ‘Ojochin’ cherry tree located next to the war monument originally commemorating WW I Japanese Canadian soldiers and later Japanese Canadian soldiers who fought in subsequent wars for Canada is a special type of rare cherry tree with branches trained to grow in a certain way. 

 

 

Fiona Tinwei Lam has authored three poetry collections and a children’s book. She edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems about Facing Cancer, and co-edited two nonfiction anthologies. Shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Prize and other awards, her work appears in over 45 anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry (2010 and 2020) and Best Canadian Essays 2024. She has collaborated on award-winning poetry videos that have screened at festivals internationally and teaches at SFU Continuing Studies. She was Vancouver’s poet laureate 2022-24. fionalam.net

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #630 : Gary Barwin and Lillian Nećakov : from Dear Badger

 

Dear Badger,

 

This day begins with a big badger of a memory, westerly winds and the sun as a golden coffin waiting to be lowered into the midnights of forever.

Epiphany, little Christmas, four days after the last night of Hanukkah, so much light, so much light, Buddy. Four humans seated at a feasting table, the badgerometry of plates, equal to but also greater than possibility. My son and daughter with their tall, protracted fingers, reaching across the hush, across a length of snow. This is what I want to remember, Badger, this is how I want to live.

Do you believe, Buddy, that memory is a limitless thing? That there are unfathomable, unbadgerable numbers of connections?

How a body comes back to us in spirit, now this way, now that. How if you leave the back door ajar, your mother might breeze in across a thin place where the distance between heaven and earth gives way. How she might be wearing a blue dress. How she might know the cut of you.

Badger, I want you to know that every crunch of snow is me speaking to you, answering what you haven’t even yet asked, what you haven’t yet imagined. Sometimes I wonder if I remembered you into being. Sometimes you are this way, sometimes that. Sometimes you are the land, locked between two seas, sometimes Saint Brigid, exalted one, the goddess whom poets adore, your countenance both here and there.

I cannot name one blessing but feel each in the everythingness of the time before, in the badgeronomy of your being. Buddy, my treasure, every word we need is already a beast growing inside us, now this way, now that.

 

Dear Badger,

 

I went into the woods looking for you. Evolution had prepared me and I felt how my mind contained the trees. Badger, did the forest contain you for you weren’t there? My exaltation was a canopy negotiating access to the sky and I said, blessings on everythingness, on time that is a sailor’s knot tying shore to sky. Blessings on badger mathematicians who say if the universe were a set of everything, it wouldn’t include itself out of humility, the way a wave is water but not sorrow. Blessings, Badger, on joy which is a butterknife in some way that I can’t explain, except that I suspect joy of containing implausibility. We throw the butterknife into the air and it spins like a butter star, the emollience of golden hour. Until it falls. Blessings on the waiting toast. On our mouths which add a festive, erotic, wet and ridiculous feature to our face. Blessing on badgers who knot themselves into the shape of stones. Blessings, Badger, my little Christmas, my Tu BiShvat, child of my letters, ancestor of envelopes or as my son used to say, antelopes for though I’ve never seen you, I remember you, like night and day on four legs. Blessings on these blessings I found in the forest, the forest which contains my mind as the word grows to mean what it was made for. These blessings I say with my mouth which is itself a sailor’s knot between wind and shore.

 

 

 

 

 

Gary Barwin is a writer, multimedia artist, and musician, the author of 33 books including, recently, Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 (Assembly Press) and Ovaryman (a play written with Tom Prime, published in Dead Code and other dramatic entertainments, Anti-Oedipus Press) and The Fabulous Op (with Gregory Betts, Downingfield Press.) His interactive video installation, Bird Fiction, created with Sarah Imrisek, was part of Toronto’s most recent Nuit Blanche and his multimedia poetry projection will be on display on a vast wall in downtown Hamilton in February. He lives in Hamilton ON. garybarwin.com

Lillian Nećakov is the author many chapbooks, including, The Lake Contains and Emergency Room (Apt. 9 Press; shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award), as well as the full-length collections il virus (Anvil Press; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Hooligans (Mansfield Press), The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), Polaroids (Coach House Books) and The Sickbed of Dogs (Wolsak and Wynn). Her book, Midnight Glossolalia, a collaborative poetry collection with Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag was published in 2023 (Meat for Tea Press). Her book, Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses eye, a collaborative poem with Gary Barwin was published in May 2023 by Guernica Editions. She has also published in many print and online journals in Canada and the U.S. Lillian lives in Toronto.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan.

 

 

 

Tuesday poem #629 : Louise Akers : To a career hunter

 

         

Appraising as if only 
for insurance purposes 
some keening squirrel, my sight
hound 
guarantees the regular abandonment 
of tumorous and gnawed-green 
Osage-oranges, 
eaten out at the foot 
of this or that Himalayan White 
Pine. 

Colleen at spin class says to kill
the small green orange eaters “will cost
you two hundred fifty bucks 
a pop” in fines. Her husband, Friend  
of Fort Greene Park, is
quarantined in Amagansett 

through the long weekend. It’s important 
to ensure local eco-
perpetuity; it’s impossible 

to outrun the keenness of 
my hound. Her career
assessment spreads athletically 
and undiscerning over 
every local incident  
of flesh-that-burrows under 
twenty or so ounces. 

These furry pollinators, she observes, 
whose collective estates 
must hold
environmental significance, and whose 
contraband selves and celebratory
downed fruit spell liability 
for esurient arrivals even when
she comes reliably 
on lead.

 

 

 

Louise Akers is a poet and scholar living in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of two books of poetry, Alien Year (Oversound, 2020) and Elizabeth/The story of Drone (Propeller Books, 2022). Akers is currently pursuing her PhD in English and American Literature at NYU.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan