Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Leaving: Home” by Lorri Neilsen Glenn, part of the 2025 Poem in Your Pocket Day collection.

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Leaving: Home

By Lorri Neilsen Glenn

And you find yourself at the bottom of the year,

watching the snow become rain on a day when the hinge

of daylight has begun to open and clouds hide the sun

like a blank page hides a story. The snow, rare as a full

moon at yuletide, drains into the ditch along the path

to the sea, and you slip into something waterproof, open

the door to release the dog into the road where she noses

the puddling ice, then flings herself on a shrinking mound

of white, wriggling with satisfaction. Snow seldom stays

now. When was the last time you made a snow angel,

felt water slide down your neck, caught the tip of your

rogue ski on the track, plowed into a deep bank and lay

still, gazing at the boundless fourth wall, loving it for its

immensity? When did you start to question the life span

of hope, accept that even a stone cannot resist the advances

of the swelling tides. What you’ve known as flakes, drifts,

powder, crust, sleet, packing snow, graupel, gutter snirt—

even the wraith-like fingers sliding across the highway

as the blizzard buffets your car—you have known as beauty,

as both danger and comfort, part of the family of seasons

tumbling you down decades, promising return in their wake.

At the shore, geese you thought had gone south swirl

between rock shoals, a churn of black and tan and white

and brown against the sunless sky, weaving water and air.

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Copyright © Lorri Neilsen Glenn

Published as part of the 2025 Poem in Your Pocket Day collection

Lorri Neilsen Glenn is the author and contributing editor of fifteen titles of poetry, creative nonfiction and scholarly work, including The Old Moon in Her Arms: Women I Have Known and Been (Nimbus, 2024). Halifax’s first Métis Poet Laureate, she was raised on the prairies and lives in Nova Scotia. 

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