East: Timesend’s Grove

in the green oakgrove at Timesend’s
is blowing a pink rose special to that shade:
peculiar, wild and soft, not lasting, it has affinity
with what my Dolphin Baby said to me:
We’re all aswim in one big sea

out lying on the green grass beside the hedge and under the scrub
oak trees, I was watching two children coming through the dust
knee-high (and the bees were about and were zooming after those
yellow warblers that go lacing through the hedge) and with never
a sign they drifted over to the grove and snitched each one a whole
banner of roses that they held close to their jerseys till they were
nearly out of sight when suddenly they loosened up and began
madly swinging roses. Then only the mid-day left very hot
and I was listening to the wash-wash voice of my baby who was asleep
and who suddenly said, We’re all aswim in one big sea.

O Joy, the lightest tap can stir a failing sun
can give the labouring globe a spin
that starts a staggering miraculous run
of roses, trees and we and we
who do all swim in one big sea.

Colleen Thibaudeau, 1954

“East: Timesend’s Grove” is from Colleen Thibaudeau’s four-part poem “Four Corners: King’s Park, Manitoba” and appears in The Artemesia Book: Poems Selected and New, available from Brick Books.

On November 29, 2025, the James Reaney Memorial Lecture was given by poet Peggy Roffey, and the title of her lecture was Colleen Thibaudeau’s ‘Big Sea’ Vision. Inspired by Thibaudeau’s idea of how we are “all aswim in one big sea,” Roffey explained that “The poem shows how the affinity between the rose and what the baby says is created, and how that summer moment enters the speaker’s mind and memory.”

For the full version of Peggy Roffey’s lecture on Colleen Thibaudeau’s poems, see the Words Festival YouTube channel.