Poetry

When we first arrived, 1983

by Gabriela Halas

America opened —
Prairies unfolded in ever-arriving
distance. Air untarnished, fresh.

Our eyes followed waves of power lines,
their undulating surge of promise.
Impenetrable words

crowded the air
like dense boreal. We needed to split the tongue,
slit like seismic lines;

corridors of language connected,
fragmented. Government placement
in small-town Alberta. Ameri-ka,

Kanada — an immigrant knows
how to replace one
for the other. Old words ruptured —

new ones formed like plaster
around our mouths.
We drove north

where my father, with his six-month-old English,
found work in oil-rich mines.
Bowls of earth carved

like a god’s terraced garden. Drunken spruce sank
in sedated chaos
like our immigrant thoughts —

where nothing is as it appears.
I remember taking my thumb and forefinger,
traversing an atlas; stretched to shape

our tiny country resting along the buckled spine
of the Rockies, hardly filling an eighth
of this new place. Nearly treeless lawns, in awe —

the gentle slow arc of water,
watering. Every house had a spare room
or three. Fenced front and back,

our own private country’s small walls
stood in perfect symmetry.
Our father spent twenty years

in shift-work at the machine shop; an informal United
Nations. Our mother, a lifetime cashier,
her daughters the first to go to school.

Nearly forty years later,
the newly arrived,
as we once were,

find fences,
straight,
are not flush; weighted

like walls. They are meant
to be climbed.
Threats shouted in America,

Canada — twists of the tongue.
Words crowd the air
like rush-hour traffic.

We are all born somewhere
we do not end up.

Appeared in Issue Spring '21