Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Daphne Marlatt : Two poems



grateful for coffee


Malay pan-roasted kopi-O dark & sweet tho’ likely Nescafe’s thin
brown with powdered milk & sugar then for him reminder of home
forgetting way back Arab culture import localized we cling to what’s
familiar kopi kedai now on Beach Street’s daily stop provisional home
taste fragrant comfort sweet on tongue waylays delays any long view
back or forward to this port street’s future drowned under rising
global warm





Lebuh Pantai now


where Chartered Bank Chambers where your office its arcade
compradoric style from treaty ports in China’s Shanghai Bund

child-i only knew its shade those white columns war-amputee beggars
curled up to sleep we walked its cool stone squares up marble steps
greeted by the syce who’d drive us home

Lebuh Pantai once on the beach so Beach Street then its storage
go-downs and ghat steps down to free port jetties Weld Street pushed
Beach back from water’s edge new pier access for tin ore freighters
liners with sea mail later Japanese subs Italian warships

no free port now international cruise ships dock at Swettenham
still Swettenham in name still Frank Athelstane in white silk suit
still a British Governor’s imprint

real history a Swiss-Canadian friend said is a sense of belonging
to a collective in time

colonial contracts were four years’ work then “leave” 
like ships passing in the night you wrote
you who kept returning





Vancouver poet Daphne Marlatt’s many titles include Steveston, The Given (awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now, and Reading Sveva, a poetic response to the work of the Italian-Canadian painter Sveva Caetani. In 2013, House of Anansi published a new edition of her critically acclaimed novel Ana Historic, with foreword by Lynn Crosbie.  In 2017, Talonbooks released Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems 1968-2008 edited by Susan Holbrook.

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