Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Rolled Up Sleeves” by Marjorie Bruhmuller, which first appeared in Poetry Pause in November 2020.

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Rolled Up Sleeves

By Marjorie Bruhmuller

Because your lips are warm
and you are wearing smudged clothes
after digging up the potatoes
and picking beans

and because I cut your hair
on the porch in the sun, and shaved
your beard, touched your head,
your ears and neck,

because it is thundering
and a storm is brewing,
because it’s almost our anniversary
and 26 years is a long time—

or maybe it’s because you smell like earth
and wind, and the way you smile at me
from your leafy paradise, that I love you,
again and again and more.

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Copyright © Marjorie Bruhmuller

First appeared in Poetry Pause in November 2020.

Previously published in The Bell You Hardly Hear, Ekstasis Editions, 2017.

Marjorie Bruhmuller is an award winning poet, songwriter, editor and creator of tiny art books, living in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. She has two books, The Bell You Hardly Hear, (Ekstasis Editions) and Back Porch Haiku, (editions des petits nuages) and two chapbooks, Water Wings, and Holding Up The Sky, (Pink Wheelbarrow Press.). She is a long-time member of TILT writing group, and has had work published in literary magazines across Canada, the US and the UK.

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