Mourning Doves

Moni brar

The mourning doves slice dawn with their   wooe wooe wooe

and know that the word motherland was once only a murmur,

an outline that could be quilled with memories.

They know how the sun licks the saltwater in the sky

and how time ripens on trees. They watch my mother

pass a mala through her fingers, each rosewood bead

smooth with prayer and stained with vacant hope,

each   waheguru waheguru   an incantation that speckles the air.

They don’t know she was raised by monsoons,

cleaved from cotton fields, her mouth cut from fennel.

They land at my father’s feet to peck at seeds

that won’t blossom, seeds he doesn’t recognize

but counts. This land is fertile in ways he never imagined.

They remember when a smile split open his face,

and he breathed this air for the first time.

Moni Brar is an uninvited settler who lives, writes and learns on unceded, unsurrendered territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region and the land of the Syilx of the Okanagan Nation. She is a Punjabi, Sikh Canadian writer exploring diasporan guilt, identity, cultural oppression, and intergenerational trauma. She believes in the possibility of healing through literature. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in PRISM international, Hart House Review, Existere, The Maynard, untethered, and various anthologies.