“To the Elderly Woman, Knitting” by Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “To the Elderly Woman, Knitting” by Sneha Subramanian Kanta, part of the 2025 Poem in Your Pocket Day collection.
To the Elderly Woman, Knitting
By Sneha Subramanian Kanta
in the lunchroom of a senior residence condominium.
I won’t know if you completed the knitting, or if it matters
if you didn’t. This country won’t give us homes.
You always waved to me and I waved back.
You showed me the design you were embroidering,
I would hold up a grocery bag, sometimes two.
There is language exchanged without words in this fleeing
scenery nobody will remember. I have sat in places hearing
immigrants being blamed for the growing towers.
They cannot decipher that these homes aren’t for us.
The room you sit in looks like the 60s, as if time
has smeared sepia on unlit corridors where sunlight crawls in.
Perhaps I remind you of your daughter or a friend you want
to reach your arm towards— this country won’t give us time.
But we take time out the same way we try to create temporal homes
looking out at wrinkling curtains. The years pass faster than we age.
Today, let us not grieve. We will converse in spaces of silence
to become holier at the touch of day. Who needs to know names
for friendship? We will make a miracle of our glistening bodies.
You can weave red threads into the fabric and I will write to you—
despite leaving the home, despite not wanting to leave,
despite an oncoming rainstorm, despite the prospect of snow.
Copyright © Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Published as part of the 2025 Poem in Your Pocket Day collection
Born in Mumbai, Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a multi-genre writer, academician, and editor residing in the Greater Toronto Area. She is the author of several chapbooks including Ancestral-Wing and Ghost Tracks. Her collection Hiraeth is a finalist for the 2024 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and has been published as a digital book and an audiobook in partnership with Apple Books and Penguin Random House Canada. An award-winning writer, her work has been recognized by several institutions including Ontario Arts Council, GRANTA, Tin House, The Charles Wallace Trust, The Writers’ Union of Canada, The Vijay Nambisan Foundation, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Writers’ Trust of Canada, and British Council. Her work has been widely anthologized internationally including in The Penguin Book of Indian Poets (ed. Jeet Thayil) published by The Penguin Random House imprint Hamish Hamilton and Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems (ed. Nomi Stone & Luke Hankins) published by Orison Books. She is one of the founding editors of Parentheses Journal.
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