Unmarked Graves: Kamloops Indian Residential School, British Columbia, 2021

There’s a gash in the path, since the storm.

A limestone lightning-bolt, shot through the bitumen,

open to the bedrock.

On Kit’s beach my boy finds an oyster,

the one the gulls have missed,

turns it over in his man-hands, my boy.

He flicks at a barnacle,

digs his white thumb nail in between the layers.

He was always a picker –

woodchip; that divot on the flip-top desk;

sunburn, raggy-edged like a map of Canada.

Shielding the city from the worst of the waves,

the seawall behind us is peeling too.

A graffiti palimpsest –

I was here/ I am here/ I will be here –

written and rewritten in red and blue.

And whitewashed.

Whitewashed.

Whitewashed.

A little one in moccasins

Leads us over the water to

the pillar beneath the bridge.

The words are scratched four-feet tall.

I can’t count how many children,

they say.

(Shortlisted for The Wells Festival of Literature Open Poetry Competition 2022 )