A poetry video by James Wang and Analee Weinberger produced by Vancouver’s 6th Poet Laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam based on James Wang’s poem about the unknown Chinese workers buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver. Produced for the cemetery’s annual All Soul’s event in 2023, and as part of the Vancouver Poet Laureate’s City Poems Project 2022-2024
We used to play
……..up the hill, bunkered under granite wings.
I wander tall among ancestors now
……..footsteps buoyed on the breeze
stone islets stay supine.
……..They beckon to me, a roster call
of Chius and Chins
……..Suens and Lees.
Here in no man’s land
……..I am every man’s son.
They beg me to crouch, to smell
……..the moss transfused with tangerines
to touch my beating palm to the earth.
……..I tell them of my voyages up the hill
surveys of shipwrecked sirens.
……..They nod along their dandelion heads.
I ask if they are lost.
……..Wingbeats inscribed their epitaphs
dragonflies floating in Toisan wind
……..atom by atom, a pilgrimage to pillars of dust.
Some are called home
……..to the mountains, some to the sea’s rising tide
the rest go with me
……..back up the hill.
James X. Wang is a writer, physician, and Chinese-Canadian settler on the unceded Indigenous lands of Vancouver. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Arc, The Fiddlehead and Augur, as well as in two collaborative chapbooks (“Brine” and “Adventitious Sounds”). His work has also been featured at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, CBC Radio, Mountain View Cemetery, and the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen. He is a member of the emerging poets group “Harbour Centre 5”