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Image: Leaving, acrylic on canvas, 18” x 24”

This Thanksgiving weekend it will be twelve years since we moved to our home on Pender Island. To mark the occasion, I’ve chosen Leaving (from Belonging, Sono Nis) for this week’s Wednesday Poem.

This is another of those rare ‘gift’ poems.  A friend had recently told me she was leaving her 25-year marriage, and as I thought about all that must mean for her life, my mind wandered off to partings of my own. Just two of several I recalled were how hard it had been when I finally decided to leave a political group I’d been in for several years; and then, decades later, what it had been like when I left a job I’d thought I’d stay in until I retired.  Once I finally picked up my pen to write, the poem simply emerged, all but intact.


LEAVING


We take one step at a time when we leave
a love, a job, a belief
after spending days, perhaps months, years
dismissing doubts,
their presence, ripples in the air
that can be as soft as moths
wings we pretend are only
the ordinary in and out of our breath – 
clouds against windows
clear, and one day we see our world differently,
feel our hands press against that glass,
the cold of it flinging us back
one last time
into the heart of a home we have known
where each piece in its usual place
seems rearranged
as if we are already gone