Your poem/s
Cannot be found
Lost in the annals
Of a digital archive
Broken links
Take me to paywalls
Now
You have left us
With these places to visit
With only
Vague snippets
Of your work
That may have been so
Much more
Could I find it
Now I will write for you
This
Shortened line
Breaking things down
The whiteness
Down the white
Page
The white
Fingers reaching out for
The red and yellow
The redress and reparations
They said sorry
For that too
The Japanese internment camps in the 80s
When we were feathering our hair
You were reminding us
Of the truth of how
Your parents became Manitoba
Beet farmers
My ancestors were beet farmers
You know I’ve seen photos of their
Fat-as-sausage English beet farmer
Fingers
Too alongside
Me here
Where the air cooler
Comes through windows
Fall they found him
Rigor mortis at his typewriter
Not you Roy Miki but the other
Roy Kiyooka painter and poet
You wrote about
Friend of the TISH they say
Was shit in reverse
Bobby and Daphne now
Still here all the names
nothing now
No thing
Gone
We will all be
Spirits in the cooling air
Soon too
like the leaves
That are turning and
The snow arriving over the mountain
Passes
Palimpsest
Covered in absence
a digital white
Wash of
your poems
I will find a real book
With pages beaten leaves
Pulp and paper for these
Fingers to touch
Now
I will
Find a Roy Miki Poem.
10 Oct. 2024
Craig
Carpenter is a curator of the monthly poetry series snpinktn Speaking. He works developing
speech technologies for the critically endangered language of nsyilxcn on syilx territory, the Okanagan valley of British Columbia, where he
also works as an editorial advisor for Theytus Books. A former literary editor
for poetry magazines such as Out of
Service and The Carleton Arts Review,
he was a student of the late poet Robert Hogg. His podcast about the TISH
collective and Robert Hogg can be found here: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/robert-hogg-the-widening-circle-of-return/