Immigrants by Jiameng Xu

May 3, 2023
Poem title: Immigrants Poet name: Jiameng Xu Poem: Pulled from dreams of a land You’re already calling your past You wake to new walls, new ceilings To snow that stays on the grass Here bare branches like skeleton hands Rise from the ground Leaves are painted in fire – One can change one’s colours To suit the times Your tongue curls to fill the contours of new sounds Your lips to new forms, yearning to be understood But your mouth has a memory of its own Yet when you write letters home Your fingers warm to the well-worn edges Of oft-learnt characters Their weights and angles are within you, and you vow Never to forget their shape In the night you speak with her, your voices Braiding a thread of solace Looking at her now-smooth face, you know The strident winds, the inertial cold Will etch their passage onto her skin As the tree rings of a life In the lines beneath her eyes You’ll read the chronicle of your journey Now side-by-side, sharing a single pair Of gloves, you fold your inner hands Into each other as you walk into snow She starts talking to you of children That’s when you know – She wants to stay too Overhead the stars look different What destinies do they hold? Here they call you brave Back home they call you crazy Maverick Disobedient It depends on which face Of the earth you’re standing on End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Jiameng Xu Jiameng Xu graduated from the MD-PhD program at McGill University in 2021. She completed her PhD dissertation, “Practices of Being Near: An Ethnographic Study of Family Members and Persons with Lived Experience of Mental Illness,” in the department of Rehabilitation Science and the Connected Narratives Lab led by Professor Melissa Park. She has been involved in initiatives to create a space for the arts and humanities within health professional training and settings of health-care delivery, including Journeys Through Health, an exhibition of artworks by persons with lived and living experience of illness that was displayed within the halls of two teaching hospitals in Montreal. She helped to found the McGill Humanities and Arts in Medicine interest group, and was nominated by her medical school classmates to deliver a speech at their graduation ceremony. Currently a psychiatry resident at the University of British Columbia, she aims to dedicate her career to working with patients and their families.