Three Questions on Re-Entry at the Canadian Border
Where is home?
Dawn begins with the skylight—
thin rays widening into day—
a bedspread of yellow slowly warming
our cheeks and foreheads. Awake,
who wouldn’t chase the sun
through windows east to west
like the flicker arrowing its flight
back to the nest. Lives past
that brief noon day arc, our backs
and bones settle into rocking
as we slide between past and present,
of what’s old, what’s new, what’s hot or cold
but stopping at Now
like the hiss of steam.
What is the purpose of your visit?
Blooddrops from a god’s spear
formed islands. Scattered hilltops rose
out of the sea, their cliffs one-colored
barnacles. How the wave patterns crash
and overlap, then the eruption in pitch,
roll, and yaw. Darker the blue, the deeper.
No one knows how whitecaps
of foam are ferried forward,
each path salted with brine.
Do you have anything to declare?
Sea wind blew our hair
into streamers as we searched tidepools
for chitons and the orange-red
of nudibranches. How we stood, stooped
on that uneven ground, shoes clattering
among the rounded rocks and slashed basalt.
My tangled white and black strands
were whips of time, lashing
crow lines about my eyes, blurring
what there was to see. We failed
in our goal to bring back nothing.
Sharon Hashimoto’s The Crane Wife was co-winner of the 2003 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize and recently reprinted by Red Hen Press. Her second collection, More American, won the 2021 Off the Grid Poetry Prize.
Header photo by Xuân Tuấn Anh Đặng, courtesy Pixabay.
