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.
