Sweet Surrender (#117)

This humidity has me a haze, dreaming of past summer days. (Or: a new poem has entered the game.)

Part of Campfire Notebook’s format is a monthly poetry feature. As I continue to work on new poetry submissions offline, I still want to share examples of my work with you. These are poems created purposefully each month to share around the Campfire.

Sugar Pants
cloud fibres carded,
stretched over sky blue canvas -
the colour of jeans, bleached
from the haze of a 1989 summer day.

those were the days, weren’t they?

those were the days that go the way
only delicious dreams can dissolve on waking.
no - like how candy crystals soften 
to stain lips grape,
to match cherry shoulders,
and the blueberry stars bursting 
from our sugar sack pants. 
the “extra fine” cotton 
(gifted, from a dad’s punishing days on the docks 
shoveling sweetener under the shimmering molten heat)
now renewed into uniforms 
fit for those precious few weeks 
that spool with possibility between school years. 
we became tie-dyed-in-the-wool explorers,
building new empires in crushed rock and mud, 
bartering at the pop shoppe for more sweets to quench our neon thirst 
that remained unslaked by water from the hose 
or single fans spreading stale air around your bedroom.

and now?
I look up to white streaks on denim and yearn to see castles to conquer again.
I close my eyes to conjure you through the humid reverie.
but it’s like we’re wrapped in waxed paper; 
there are barely shapes that suggest 
a smile, 
a smear of popsicle,
a silhouette of sugar pants
worn until they were cirrus clouds.

those were the days.

I don’t know why the parents decided to make sugar sack pants. (I wish I had a photo of them; the above was the best next alternative.)

But one day, my best friend’s dad came home from his job at the “sugar shack” with an armful of the cotton bags. Like a loose linen, it was perfect for the days that baked us that summer. And being the late 80s, we had to make them as bright as possible. We spent a summer’s day tie-dying the fabric before they were sewn into pants that served us well that summer.

Oh, baby, we thought we were pretty darn cool.

The Lantic Sugar Refinery was built in Saint John in 1912 and processed cane sugar until its’ closure in 2000 due to consolidation with a larger plant in Montréal. The dock where it stood still remains empty, waiting for a new project. (Photo: eBay)

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Thanks for reading this month’s creation, friends. You can check out other poems I’ve created for the Campfire here:

Invasive Species | The Tangent Function | A Spark That Spreads | Mango | Tangled Whispers | Springtime Elegy | Cannonball

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