Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Rolling our cobs” by Diane Massam, part of the League’s Fresh Voices program.

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Rolling our cobs

By Diane Massam

Missing builds slowly
we can’t feel finality
fully at first, but today
I was bruised by the wall
of it, thinking of you, and
when I think of you
I think of food, we were
always at your table, long,
generous and ample. Today
I saw a storm cloud with a
U-shaped groove and
suddenly it was August,
suddenly, the sweetness
of corn, we were forming
canoes communally in
sunny pounds of butter, rolling
our cobs, oh how they shone
as they met with the angular salt
sprinkled down to poppy-pattern
plates, scarlet under high blue skies.
In my ears, small explosions, the
crunching of kernels, in my teeth,
tenacious pericarp, extending
the pleasure. Oh let it be August
again, in L’Acadie where Québec
vowels are long and strong around
me like the farmland, where laughter
floats over fields and lifts the
corn bugs flapping erratically,
stupidly, clumsily, falling around
us, and thick sliced tomatoes
warm from the vine sharpen
the moment, startling our mouths –

we didn’t know it was
the taste of time
flying by.

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Copyright © Diane Massam

Diane Massam writes about time, place, and the entanglement of nature and mind. With recent/upcoming poems in Arc, Queen’s Quarterly, and The New Quarterly, she was the winner of the 2021 FBCW poetry contest. A professor emeritus of linguistics at U. of T., she lives in her hometown, Victoria, where she spends as much time as possible on the beach, in gardens or forests, or around the table with family and friends.

Fresh Voices is a publication and workshop program created by and for the League’s associate members.

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