By Joan Naviyuk Kane

I wished to be closer to my mother
to think of displacement in a different way.

To part the bright green new growth
of a plant she has asked me to gather.

We never imagined so many years apart.
I have no way to make amends.

Set adrift, I wanted to stay near the shore
of something familiar but instead I trace

the shape of tuqaayuk, sea lovage, wild
celery, with something other than my tongue.

I wish for my family to be its own refuge,
for the sorrow to become something islandic.

Someplace we can travel back to together
if we have to, if we make it through these days.

Poet Bio

Inupiaq poet Joan Naviyuk Kane grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She earned a BA at Harvard University and an MFA at Columbia University. Kane’s spare, lyric poems are rooted in her Arctic homeland and concerned with movement: enlarging, thawing, accruing, crossing, even at times transforming. She considers themes of ecological, domestic, and historical shifts. See More By This Poet

More By This Poet