Canada

Robyn Sarah’s memoir, Music, Late and Soon, appeared in 2021. Her collection My Shoes Are Killing Me won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2015. She lives in Montreal.

The poem:

Winter is here once more.
(What were we expecting?)
Winter has crept up on us.

The leaves came down on schedule
when we weren’t watching
(weren’t watching the leaves, that is)—
we were watching the news
instead of the leaves,
and one day we woke
to bare trees and frozen puddles,
wondering how we missed the colours.

As for summer—was there a summer?
Why don’t we remember?

Look outside:
it’s a day without brine,
sky bland as the white
of a hard-boiled egg,
no flakes in the air today,
no frost ferns on the window,
gaiety in abeyance

only another winter day,
only the cold, and the early dark,
and a growing desire to mend fences

maybe a wish or two, quiet ones:
to get a few things done
while we still can,
a few things, slowly,
one by one,

and to see, and to see, and to see