Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “This land currently called Canada” by Susie Whelehan.

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“This land currently called Canada”

By Susie Whelehan

After Jesse Wente

When I heard him say these words

I stopped rinsing my cereal bowl,

stood still,

looked at the radio,

shook my head and smiled.

Of course,

“currently”.

Not “now”

as if it was once Turtle Island and will be

Canada forever, but

“currently”,

for the time being—

in this river of time and impermanence,

this time of reconciliation

with Indigenous peoples

and with the land itself,

currently called Canada.

Jesse Wente is a self-described “Ojibway Dude” who regularly comments on Film and Pop Culture on CBC Radio

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Copyright © Susie Whelehan

Previously published in The Sky Laughs at Borders (Piquant Press 2019). First appeared in Poetry Pause on September 21, 2020.

Susie lives and writes on the ancestral land of the Anishnabeg, the Wendat, the Haudenosaunee, the Chippewa, and the Mississaugas of the Credit peoples, currently called Toronto. She is a certified AWA Writing Facilitator, writes Spontaneous Poems for all occasions, keeps her radio tuned to the CBC, loves words, grammar, rhythm and rhyme, and all things Springsteen.

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