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Gising by Steffi Tad-y

By League of Canadian Poets | March 3, 2022

Poem name: Gising Poet name: Steffi-Tad-y Poem begins: I can’t remember if it were barbed wire or bits of beer glass the bougainvillea towered over, or an orange boomerang then a scar under my eye. One day, I want to retire from seeing only the spectacle. Live long enough to grow with my hands. To press one’s fingers into the dirt. Gather beans. Make of it a warm bowl. Feed my child. Muscle a cramped road. This is my signal. Today, I will celebrate. Sunflowers from Sxótsaqel spring out of a car window. A basset hound says hello with their pink nose. Here is someone’s grandfather in a bucket hat, bobbing to Purple Rain. My nephew and his two milk teeth- with a thread around them. His mother by the door. I wish you were here to see him. The way he says wow. In our language, to wake up rhymes with blessing. The sun begins to line my irises. My niece, how she sings Baby Shark. What else can I tell you? Let us go. There is side-street parking. The ticket machine looks like a pair of binoculars across an orchid mural. Keys and raincoats on the table. I have been late all this time. End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Steffi Tad-y Previously published in Train Journal (2021). Steffi is a poet & writer from Manila. She is the author of two chapbooks, I Did Not Want to Be Read from Frog Hollow Press (2019) & Merienda from Rahila’s Ghost Press (2021). Her first full-length book of poems, From the Shoreline is forthcoming from Gordon Hill Press in Spring 2022. She lives in Vancouver, BC in the unceded & ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

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