Uprooted
from Persian gardens
of my dawning bed,
I was a cypress tree replanted
in eternal ice of Montreal, muttering
Gilles Vigneault’s “Les gens de mon pays”
for the saffron sun, sidewalk café sitting
in summer’s shade, reading my mother’s
letter from Tehran
saying my fellow cypress trees
who held their heads high in breeze
were replanted in filth of Evin
jail for years, for just havin’
in their homes Brecht and Lenin.
Oh, I returned (between sips of beer
and puffs of Gitanes), Mother dear
up here too, things have been amiss
for hundreds of white fleurs-de-lys
poets thinkers artists and journalists
all rounded up and sent to Parthenais
prison for days of forced stay
and payback for just backing
Quebec’s liberty.
I walked away from the sidewalk café
to post the letter, an Innu girl in dismay,
a true caribou in grief’s blue vest,
bumped into me chest to chest,
possessed by memory of the French
Québécois who called her Sauvagette
du bois, who booed her and shooed her
people off to reserves shaped in alcohol,
aches, suicide and stirred souls.
She said she missed her missing
mother who was nothing but stories
of gaps, ghosts and dark places,
who shape-shifted into cypress
trees, flowers of the lily, caribou
and other displaced faces.
That evening, in the blue shadow
of my balcony on rue de Bordeaux
I went Jackson Pollack on the letter
to my mother and threw it up into
the full circle of the moon
to mark my epiphany
in the finest tune
of my wild
desperation.
