Canadian/British Couple Moves to Canada after 20 Years in Hong Kong
by Kate Rogers

We journey towards a home
not of our summer.
Its winter trees will stiffen our bones.
Its rocks are sharp as teeth
in an avalanche. Pebbles stare.

Good fortune gifts us this arrival
carried on feet worn flat by roads
that led to every destination but this one.

We journey towards a home
where we hope the full moon
will halo our heads,
mythical ancestors
will applaud us. Our migration
displaces no one.

We aren’t running for our lives, as Darwish was,
but nevertheless, there is glory.

The frozen lake grinds sand beach
from stone. Tropical fruits
hard and green. We will suck juice
from the thin rind
of the winter sun.

Of our new home we will see only difference.
We will fall, we will fall,
until we learn to skid and steer,
until we learn to walk lightly
on snow’s thin crust,
inhale the blades
of skinning knives, exhale clouds.

Until our souls drift over
from the old land
in their own good time.
Only then can this become home.

Kate Rogers‘s poem “John and the Book of Kells recently won First Place in the Trinity College Dublin 2019 Book of Kells Creative Contest, while her poem “The Giraffe-bone Knife Set” was short-listed for the ROOM 2019 Poetry Contest. Her poetry has appeared in Understorey Magazine, World Literature Today, Fieldstone Review, Tamaracks: Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century, Algebra of Owls, Twin Cities: An Anthology of Twin Cinema from Singapore and Hong Kong, Juniper, the Guardian, Asia Literary Review, Kyoto Journal, among other places, and in the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology (2017). Her poems won second place in the 2019 Big Pond Rumours Contest. Kate’s latest poetry collection is Out of Place (Quattro-Aeolus House, Toronto, 2017).