First Generation

My country, though I wasn’t your birth-child 
you still folded me in 
where I took root; and you allowed me indistinguished rest
beside the fat of your own 
and claimed me a space among them. 

I am yours; 
though another raised me 
and a farther soil birthed me, 
yours is the name I claim myself. 

In childhood you knew me, 
and I passed my hand over the loam same as your sons and sisters. 

In spring I felt the first jerk 
away from your mold, when you called me 
by my old name. 

A name I had forgotten, but which 
screwed me to time – a country I’d never known 
but which my father assured me 
was mine. 

I was rooted up from place, 
and the self I had known, I understood 
as only an idea planted in time, 
when I was something called — an echo tripping 
along the corridors of memory — “Landed.” 

what could the word mean but the births this land harvested from itself;
what land is there other 
than the one in which your roots run? 

I know today the consequence of speaking to my faceless cousins,
shouting expansively over the phone lest the voice stumble through space.
I was landed and they were in space — 
floating until they landed.

Would we need to make a space for them in this ground, then,
when they were sown here? 
And if they tumbled along the stony ground and 
hadn’t properly

landed? 

Would they sprout and offer fruit, 

or lay 

in dormant statelessness, 

with no land to call them by its name? 

I would like my sons to look to me 
and ask for their origins, 

or else

accept this land as the only one their ascendants had ever known
and never scurry about the fields of time to make sure
they had safely 

landed

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Arman Kazemi is a writer and arts organizer based in Vancouver, Canada. His poetry has appeared in Canadian and US-based journals such as PRISM International and Inverted Syntax, while other writing has been featured in the Globe and Mail, CBC, the Georgia Straight. Arman's writing focuses on immigrant identity in the context of his Iranian-Canadian settler identity, tracing personal history through the lens of collective myth. He is also a co-founder of MENA Film Festival which he has co-directed since 2019. A forthcoming collection is in the works with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.