Poem with Real and Fake Plants

I have come to dread summer

thick air and wildfire

light splitting the blinds loudly

so that there is noise

even when I book a flight,

commit to whatever

boiling point we are reaching

and have reached.

In Toronto I sat down

by Kapwani Kiwanga’s

keyhole garden for three hours

because the art was plants

that cleaned the air.

My laptop was divine

and the security guard across me smiled

like the good co-worker I dream of having,

someone who understands that announcing

joyous community and the falsity

of transactional relationships openly

would be missing the point.

Why is it that people on the move

are seen to be lost? The colonial

hangover of adventureas-

storytime still makes our questions

but not my tiredness which

comes from the heat and the shame

of fainting, not being able to tolerate it

as if there is something wrong with my body

for its refusal. But this is a hangover

too. Nothing is bygone, obviously. Let me eat my fish

in a cool room, please. There is a reason

someone like me feels at home

in hotels, eavesdropping on fake plants

that look succulent in warm lighting.

I miss the oak outside the window,

can hear it bending with the wind,

can remember my ancestors from two hundred years ago

sitting under another tree

waving at the lion approaching,

singing in prayer and solidarity

and the hospitality of trust.

 

Shazia Hafiz Ramji received a 2023 Critic’s Desk Award from ARC Poetry magazine and was shortlisted for the 2023 Alberta Magazine Awards. Her fiction has appeared in The Malahat Review and her poetry has appeared in the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize anthology. She lives in Western Canada and London, UK. Shazia is the author of Port of Being and is at work on a novel.