Every Heart

The maps have been redrawn and the roads
are filled again with refugees.

Have you not heard? 
Even the stones listen,

hold each footstep.
Heartbeats 

return to the earth, engraved
on stone, touched with fingertips

of memory. Cobbled roads
are lined with linden trees, yellow

with blossoms in summer. Their lingering 
scent draws the bees, flavors the honey. 

August breeze through withered grass,
the river’s pull. Each is a longing. 

Do you not know? 
The body is at once matter and light,

the firmament 
without border. Separation

displaces the earth, and every heart 
is drawn to love, but like a refugee.

Even the dust
of stars makes its way home to the body, 

and the planets gather in their house
when a woman gives birth.

Connie T. Braun (MA Humanities; MFA) instructs creative writing and mentors undergraduate writers and editors and has published two books of non-fiction and two poetry chapbooks. Grounded in the war-refugee and immigrant experience of World War II, her explorations of memory and witness of trauma, silences and language, and the sites of geographical and spiritual displacement and belonging are resonant in the present. Her academic and personal essays, poetry and reviews, appear in various journals and anthologies, and her poetry has been set to musical compositions. She is a full member of the League of Canadian Poets, among other writing associations, and lives in Vancouver.

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