“Mountain Walk Offering for My Godson” by Hari Alluri
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Mountain Walk Offering for My Godson” by Hari Alluri.
Mountain Walk Offering for My Godson
By Hari Alluri
May you outgrow many pairs of shorts, Anak.
And if a dryer doesn’t get them first,
your socks might inch down past your heels
bothering your arch and toes. That pattern will turn
to wearing thin, to changing style.
Those dryers will continue to take your socks.
If I didn’t already know the danger-cost of this,
I would ask you to invent a drying machine
that gives back as many socks as you feed it,
but my dreams aren’t yours. Bless that.
Despite our best intentions, if we reach thirst,
the water in us calling for more water,
we should have responded sooner. Cramps do come
to an end. When you work, remember, that’s stardust
under your fingernails; stardust, bird poo, everything
between. Yes, this earth. Learn to make your fingertips
the aroma of garlic. Your parents have scars,
please be gentler than me when you touch their ridges,
some are older than them, older than Lola’s lola: all of them
an attempt at healing. You and your sister—dalawalang
sayo—may you always share facing each other and fight
back to back. Islands born from one volcano, clay
forged in fire, spirits given breath. The two of you
will teach me—pens to scraps of paper, laughing
in your indoor socks, making up ancient
symbols as if from actual memory: audacity, divinity—
there are things we learn somehow not to lose.
Copyright © Hari Alluri
Previously published in Tabako on the Windowsill (Brick Books, 2025).
Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is an award-winning poet, editor, and facilitator who connects to the world, gratefully, on unceded Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and unceded land of the T’uubaa-asatx Nation. His work is available widely in anthologies, journals and online. Author of The Flayed City (Kaya Press) and chapbook Our Echo of Sudden Mercy (Next Page Press), his new collection is Tabako on the Windowsill (Brick Books).
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