Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Waking To An Empty House” by Rob Taylor, from Weather (Gaspereau Press, 2024), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award.

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Waking To An Empty House

By Rob Taylor

My family out in the light

now brightening my pillow

so finally I read the thick

biography a bit and weep a bit

and lie there sensing

every organ’s bellows

and wonder which will go

which gasping

the branches of that tree

my son is grasping.

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Copyright © Rob Taylor

From Weather (Gaspereau Press, 2024), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award.

Rob Taylor is the author of five poetry collections, including Weather and The News, which was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Rob is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation and Best Canadian Poetry 2019. He teaches creative writing at the University of the Fraser Valley, and lives with his family in Port Moody, BC, on the unceded territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

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