"BABIES' COTTAGE" BY JOHN DONLAN

Where do we come from?
What are we?
Where are we going?
Don’t ask.

The mountains across the harbour
were a chain of offshore islands
before their long slow crash
into British Columbia.

The ground we walk on, hard-packed clay and gravel,
was carried down the mountains
by glaciers and rivers now vanished.
The hospice around the corner

once housed family court;
before that it was Babies’ Cottage, an orphanage.
Someone sits by a lamp in the fog-shrouded lounge.
Above the fog, we are told, the sun is shining.

November 23, 2005


	Babies’ Cottage