Leanne Shirtliffe
Poetry
Born and raised in rural Manitoba, Leanne Shirtliffe is a writer and educator now based in Calgary, Alberta. She is working on a poetry collection at the intersection of farming, feminism, and family. Some of Leanne’s recent work appears in The Kenyon Review, Passengers Journal, Freefall, and Free the Verse. She collects overheard haiku on Instagram at @leanne_shirtliffe.
September
The combines whirred in the fields
surrounding the headstones
the day we buried my father,
and the gravedigger
from God-knows-where
covered him with topsoil
more costly than coffins.
After we walked away,
the backhoe
went back to work,
excavating extra graves
that were deemed more likely
than canola hitting twelve bucks a bushel.
This is how farmers prepare
for darkness:
get the crop off
before the freeze.
“ My father, born and raised on a grain farm, died in the month of September. It seemed fitting that on the day we buried him—in a wide-open prairie cemetery near the land he farmed his whole life—we could see and hear combine harvesters at work. ”
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