ANNE MICHAELS

From our bed we listen to the trains crossing the city, their dark weight slipping through back gardens. We sleep between Hudson’s Bay and the Great Lakes, below geese migrating their secret paths under the stars. Here, where great rivers of history converge, travelling through the night to wake in another language. It is a city where many work in one language and dream in another, sing children to sleep in a language they do not speak. To be born in one language and fall in love in another. To sleep in one landscape and wake in another. These great transporting rivers of language converge where we live, here, where there are more than 150 words for loneliness, for shelter, for wounds, for fear, for forgetting, for memory, for gratitude. For night and for morning. Anne Michaels is Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her books have been published in more than 45 countries.