In Amber

There is no history of arrival,
no landing papers, no first memories
of the ocean’s clamor, a breeze’s
finger on the spine of afternoon,
the appearance of a flower escaping soil —
after so very much entropic sea.

There is a photo of a mother and child,
the child’s eyes downcast, arms
seemingly supporting a too frail torso,
the mother thin-lipped, wary,
more feral than trusting after war,
clothed in her meager bests.

I think pupa, before metamorphosis,
before emergence, before the cognitive
I, acknowledged coal chutes and telephones,
Dickens and computers. 

She avows that she remembers
everything — every step and she has cut
a bloody line between when her feet were
still on the gangplank and when she
first  touched the Halifax ground.