Mulberry Leaves
Markham, Canada
2025, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
In my mother’s kitchen,
the windows fog with steam as she washes bok choy in a plastic basin.
Outside, the city hums, neon signs blink, buses hiss and pigeons nest in concrete cracks.
She tells me about how my great-grandfather raised silkworms,
in a village where the hills were soft and the air smelled of woodsmoke and plum.
He fed them mulberry leaves,
cut by hand in the early morning, when the sun was still waking up
and the dew clung like memory to every blade of grass.
Each cocoon was a promise.
Each thread a patience I will never really understand.
Now, the rain falls too hard or not at all,
fields turn to dust, entire cities swallowed by haze.
I scroll past oceans of news, heat leftovers in the microwave,
and forget to look outside.
I say I care about the earth,
but I do not touch it.
Especially when I see a silkworm growing on the leaves
of my neighbour’s mulberry tree
mom grows garlic in a balcony pot.
It leans toward the sun, even through smog, even through the harsh Canadian winter.
She does not call this resilience.
She just waters it.
There are stories we inherit, like recipes never written down, and yet taste the same each time.
Like how to brew chrysanthemum tea, or when to bow towards 婆婆
Not everything needs translation,
but some things do need remembering,
that the river near my ancestor’s village now runs thinner each spring,
that the land we love,
is losing its shape.
but some things are carried,
in the way we peel a mandarin, or listen to rain, as if it were a friend’s voice we once knew.
in thermoses of hot tea, in our balcony gardens, in our stubborn, seed-like resilience.
And,
in our hope.
Reflection
My poem, “Mulberry Leaves,” explores my connection to nature through the stories and traditions passed down by my family. I was inspired by memories of my mother and the stories she told me about my great-grandfather raising silkworms in the Zhejiang province. Through these stories, I began thinking about how closely older generations lived with the land, how they depended on it, respected it, and understood it in a way we often forget today. As I reflected on how climate change has altered these landscapes and traditions, I wanted to contrast that deep-rooted connection with my own experience growing up in a modern, urban environment. I tried to capture the emotional distance many of us now feel from the natural world, even as we claim to care about it. Writing this poem helped me see how climate change doesn’t just affect our Earth, it affects and shapes our own identity, culture, and memory. It can erase what we once knew, unless we carry it forward in new ways. Through this piece, I hope to remind others that protecting the environment also means protecting the wisdom, stories, and values that come with it.