Moving Poem
The quartered orange’s
soft body, sipped
from its rind
into a mouth
capable of saying
such permanent things as:
“They dug up a dog
that was buried
32,000 years ago
with a mammoth bone in
his mouth.”
Shells outlast the mollusc
by thousands of years.
Form growth lines
where the soft animal inside
didn’t have enough to eat.
Wolves came searching
for scraps but renounced scrutability.
I don’t know what I’ll do
without Vancouver’s beauty—
it’ll slip off my body
like water and disappear
into hard soil
into the open mouth of a mountain
named for a dog.
Moving Poem by Grace Kwan | Garden Lavender Poetry Reed Diffuser
Grace Kwan is a Malaysian-born sociologist and writer raised in “Vancouver,” the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. A Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominee, their first full-length book THE SACRED HEART MOTEL was published by Metonymy Press in November 2024.
