CANTEEN

Canteen

Every immigrant carries a canteen of tears across the borders,
even those relieved to leave, or leaving nothing behind them
but trouble. The past's straight trunk having once forked,
we take a new shape, adopt a crabbed or a graceful stem.

More likely, both. Escaped by the skin of our teeth, or
condemned and seized by it, turned into greed's grim cargo;
arriving promise-flushed, or loss-abraded and footsore.
All of us have skin in this liminal game of come and go.

Our lives depend on welcome, whether by kin or strangers.
Welcome, we consider an entitlement, is simply sheer blessing,
whether funneled by birth into this continent of dangers
or carried here by air, boat, feet, container, for our crossing.

If, once excused our debt, we refuse to forgive another's,
will we ever sleep securely in our own beds
in this country we've emptied of friends, sisters, brothers,
to fill with imagined enemies instead?

In the Beginning

I have a bone to pick with you, Almighty One.
What did you think would happen?
When you poked a hole in the emptiness
and whispered light into it -- a beam
into the box of the sky's emulsion --
starting soil precipitating, imps of proteins set a-dance.
Camera, inner sight, photograph, your face
multiplied, looking back, upside down.

And they were fruitful and craving,
and as curious as you.
Surely you were not surprised, were you,
to lose them to caves where they spat out running
ochre auroxes all gerund and magic,
and ate inappropriately from any tree they chose,
talked among themselves,
while the garden where you had left them
became much too quiet. It's past time
you confessed to your initial loneliness and need,
negotiated fresh points of entry,
cheered their rowdy games, explained
the cryptic lines and processes.

Now we have the family album,
secrets coming out,
and we are mad, and packed, and leaving
home. You stand at the door
backlit. You wait. You watch us go.

Come Sing

Come sing, solitude,
deep as the black fleck in a spaniel's iris

solitude, leaning out
into the current of things, snagging

another eye. Desperate music.
Come sing, fellow-feeling

ungendered by time's tired flicker by,
trammeled by love's unfulfilled hamper,

still in the selfsame boat pulling
more together than not.

Sing chorus, to the flummoxed world
and its hubristic heroes

the way grandmothers or harpies
sing caution, sing saluté, sing grief

dragging sopping over the sod
flopped into its hand-dug hole.

Come sing, luminous world,
our coming and going, and your own

persistence, all you must let go,
what is reborn, reimagined, what goes on.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Phillips' chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (iblurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022). Phillips has two poems nominated for this year's Pushcart Prize. and is a finalist in the 2024 Eyelands Book Competition, and Cutthroat's Joy Harjo Poetry contest.