Saeed Koushan | + Follow Poet |
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The Weight of Elsewhere 'Part Three'

To: The Country of Absence  
Date: January 8th, 2025  
Subject: Application for Residence  
Focus: Tentative hope

Dear Canada,

Here, in your vast territories of snow and possibility,
I draw new maps from ash and remembering.
Your winter tastes like metal and silence,
your spring promises something
I'm afraid to name.

I'm learning your language of politeness—
"Sorry" threading every sentence
like prayer beads through anxious fingers.
Your grocery stores smell like
nothing I recognize,
but I'm teaching myself
to find home in their bright aisles.

I trace on maps the places that once called me home,
where doors opened wide as mother's embrace,
where currency outlasted promises,
where we learned to read
between the lines
of morning newspapers,
between the silence
of evening news.

Here, I practice opening
my own door to pizza delivery drivers
who mispronounce my name
but smile anyway.

Please accept my application for
tentative belonging,
for the right to call your snow
familiar.

---

To: The Trees That Taught Me  
Date: Today (and every day after)  
Subject: Lessons in Adaptation  
Focus: Growth

Dear Maple in my new backyard,

You whisper your wisdom
through my apartment window:
Bend but never break,
learn to grow in temporary soil.

Your roots don't ask permission
to claim foreign ground.
Your leaves don't mourn
the forest they left behind.

Tonight, I follow your lesson:
I plant my name in this going,
watch it bloom in borrowed ground,
water it with both tears
and the first tentative laughter
I've felt in months,
tend it with the patience
of someone learning
to call winter home.

*And finally call it home*

With gratitude for your patient teaching,  
A name learning to grow roots
in soil that doesn't remember
my grandmother's garden.

---

Some letters find their destination,
others become destinations themselves.
Tonight, I am both the sender
and the address
I'm trying to reach.

Copyright © Saeed Koushan | Year Posted 2025

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