My own life has been characterised by movement, often chosen.

Each movement has been a kind of uprooting and re-rooting of my life.

To borrow a metaphor from Neil Bissoondath, I carry my roots in my pockets. Sometimes I find a place to bury them. Right now and for the foreseeable future they are buried in British Columbia, Coast Salish Territory. ‘Pocketed roots’ evokes a solitary journey, but the jostle of shared life is a constant companion—digging to make space beside another, the gentle pressing down of soil, tangling our roots and branches, then pulling up roots attached to and detaching from one another.

I also have many memories of processing the jostle in specific places. The pain of moving too often has made me curious about different ways of being and feeling rooted and about how life travels through periods of meaningfulness and alienation.

In conversation with my personal history, I am regularly learning histories of displacement that have preceded the way Coast Salish Territory is now occupied: Musqueam encounters with European settlers in the 18th century, the “settlement” of Vancouver Island in the 1850s by James Douglas, the internment of Japanese-Canadian citizens during WWII, the Georgia Viaduct’s destruction of Hogan’s Alley in 1970, the ongoing “use” of temporary foreign workers in the Okanagan, and more yet for me to hear.

Here are some photos of the landscapes that have produced the roots of my work and life:

Pocketed Roots

1.

When I first coiled

my roots into my

pockets like loops of

cut umbilical cord,

I shook off the dirt

and marveled at

their length.

Now short

from lack of stretch

I rub them with my

thumb and wonder if

they could take, given

the chance in

a new place.

2.

These pocketed roots,

do they remember

the art of burrowing,

the relief of quenched thirst,

the firm press of hands,

the delight of entanglement?

Do they still gasp, remembering

the sudden sharpness of air

and breakage of uprooting?

These pocketed roots,

can they still be

buried and breathe?

3.

My daughter

handed me seeds

as we planted

our garden, and I

absentmindedly

put them in

my pockets.

Now, two weeks

later tiny

green shoots

start peeking

out at the

corner where

the cloth creas

-es. Some dirt

must have got

into the folds

among the lint.

Some sunshine

and water too.

I suppose roots can

grow new shoots

in pockets too.

-Erin Goheen (2015)

Shortlisted for Room’s poetry prize by Canisia Lubrin