By Joan Naviyuk Kane
Every door stands an open door:
our human settlements all temporary.
We share together the incidental shore
and teach the young to tend the lamp's wick,
weary of anyone small enough to bar our entry.
Poem copyright ©2021 by Joan Naviyuk Kane, “Visitors” from Dark Traffic (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.) Poem reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher.
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
Turning Back
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...