Tea Swamp Park, a haibun by Isabella Mori

Each day I get closer to the swamp that used to be where I live now. Over 170 years ago, the land that had been home for 10,000 years to the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh was “no longer considered to belong to them.”  

There’s a little commemorative park now, the size of two big lots, and in it the creek that used to run through the whole city is outlined by rocks for about fifty feet. A coffee shop sits where the beaver dam used to be that created the swamp.

And each day, the waters of the creek that somehow still run underneath whisper to me louder. Each day it is easier to imagine the labrador tea plants, or me'xwuchp, which gave the little park its name, still growing all around me.

 

ear to the ground

footsteps echo

from the past