Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Sunrise in Sydenham” by Vilma Blenman.

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Sunrise in Sydenham

By Vilma Blenman

Situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinabek Nation, Sydenham, now Owen Sound, was the most northern stop on the Underground Railroad route Black freedom seekers travelled to settle in Ontario.

There was a child left behind

who never saw sunrise in the North,

a firstborn son who slid out of her belly suddenly

landing in a cotton field where her water broke

when she gripped the handle of the hoe, holding

all that pressure from labour pain that gave her no gain.

The light-brown baby did not belong to her.

He was a son for sale.

But the first sunrise in Sydenham was hers,

hers alone, the first thing she knew she owned

after no one owned her anymore.

She saw it at once when she peered from under

blankets in the bottom of the boat, opening

her brown eyes wider than the running river.

There it was—stretched high in the sky,

a gold circle glinting, winking at her,

a flaming light that lit a fire in her bones

before the boatman spoke softly:

You can come out now. Steady and slow. Go.

Walk yonder through the woods. This here is Sydenham.

At first she stood alone in the warming woods

still gazing at the widening circle, reddish rays reaching

around trees, between branches, touching leaves,

finding the brown skin on her bare neck and drying

her wet cheeks.

All around her were witnesses to this light:

blackbirds calling, crows cawing, squirrels scampering,

acorns falling landing loudly on the dry forest floor.

So she knelt, still facing east. Lips moving, praise

rising. It’s where the farmer first saw her

in the green-gold morning in the woods,

a woman alone, wild with wonder, feeling freedom

seeing the first sunrise in Sydenham.

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Copyright © Vilma Blenman

Previously published in Brown Eyes Watching (Pickering Press, 2025).

Vilma Blenman is a Jamaican Canadian poet, a mother, and a former teacher and therapist. Her poems are dispatches from the diaspora where she’s an observer on issues of identity, Black history and the healing beauty of landscapes. She recently published, “Brown Eyes Watching: Reflections of a Black Canadian Poet,” a debut poetry collection from which this poem is taken. Vilma lives and writes in Pickering, ON.

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