Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Pre-War Photos” by Kevin Irie.

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Pre-War Photos

By Kevin Irie

Among cultured pearls,

a scarf purchased at Eaton’s,

there’s an elastic band around

photos stacked like a deck of cards.

Undo that elastic, frayed

strings of dried cuttlefish.

Fortune deals this hand.

Here are photos of girls in kimonos,

family photos in yellowed hues.

A date scrawled in brown ink,

a stunted dead vine.

This is before the War

and after. I’m lifting what’s left

of the 150 pounds

allowed for internment.

Photos packed and carried

through Slocan winters, seen

by the light of no electricity

for years. But here is the Coast,

before Pearl Harbor

fell. When Canada fought for freedom

but not for your rights.

Bayfarm, Kaslo, Sandon, the ghost town.

Do you know what’s coming,

young sisters, family?

No, they do not.

Before they became a story

no one told them could happen,

someone took a photo

to not prove it.

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Copyright © Kevin Irie

Previously published in Queen’s Quarterly.

Kevin Irie won Grain Magazine’s 2024 poetry contest, second prize in Prairie Fire’s 2024 poetry contest, third prize in The New Quarterly’s 2024 poetry contest, and Honourable Mention in Grain’s 2024 Hybrid Contest for Experimental Writing. He is in The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Haymarket Press, 2025). His most recent collection is The Tantramar Re-Vision (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). His next is Evacuations (University of Alberta Press, 2026).

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