When Your Hometown is No Longer Home by Pamela Mosher

February 27, 2023
Poem title: When Your Hometown is No Longer Home Poet name: Pamela Mosher Poem: It’s a collection of familiar trees, old houses puffing woodsmoke, good intentions collecting in nooks and crannies like pocket lint. Incessantly present. Your hometown is a place you drive through on the way to somewhere else. Which must be what it always was — that place that formed you, that sheltered you in its cupped hands — though you didn’t yet feel it as such, standing ankle-deep in the creek as a child, skipping stones along the familiar surface of the tannin-rusted water. Now the landmarks and foliage blur into a single unknowable mass in your peripheral. And the woodsmoke, accumulating, drifts out over the dark expanse of forest canopy, seeking a place to settle. End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Pamela Mosher Previously published in Juniper Poetry. Volume 6, Issue 3 (2023). Pamela Mosher is a Maritimer living in Ottawa. Her writing has been published in journals such as The New Quarterly, GRAIN, Plenitude, and Literary Mama. Pamela’s work was also recently included in Best Canadian Poetry. When she’s not writing poetry, she might be engaged in some of her other ultra cool hobbies, like gardening or cycling.