Dr Pauline Rowe – When Canada geese and a night sky offer quiet reassurance.
Some poems arrive quietly, slipping into the room almost unnoticed, until their stillness makes you stop. That is very much the case with the new piece from Dr Pauline Rowe for this year’s 52 for 26 Poetry Project. Rooted in a single moment of exhausted reflection and unexpected grace, the poem grew from an evening when one of her sons was struggling. Standing in the dark in her porch, looking up at the night sky after a difficult day, she watched two geese fly overhead. It was a small, brief interruption—the sort of thing most of us would miss—but for Rowe, it carried clarity, perspective, and a reminder of what matters.
Rowe has long been part of Liverpool’s literary fabric. A poet deeply connected to community work, she has spent over two decades writing in health and social settings, bringing language into spaces where it is often most needed. Her pamphlet The Weight of Snow, published by Maytree Press, won a Saboteur Award in 2021, and her recent projects continue to expand her reach. From 2023 to 2025, she served as Writer-in Residence for The People of Anfield, a major Culture Liverpool commission delivered in collaboration with photographer Emma Case. She is also a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, supporting writers and students across the region.
Her poem is gentle in tone but firm in its grounding. It captures a fleeting encounter with the natural world — one that arrives not with spectacle but with reassurance. Rowe even suggests that Canada Geese have something unmistakably Scouse about them, a humour that sits comfortably within the poem’s quiet sincerity.
In a project filled with voices exploring identity, memory, and place, Rowe’s piece offers a moment of steadiness. A reminder that sometimes the world answers softly, if we look up long enough to notice.
Nocturnal Vaudeville
I heard the honking horn of Harpo Marx.
The white deterrent light from Marlborough Road
cast a sudden spotlight on the gate,
to make a theatre of our shadowed home
ready for a clown’s light-footed dash.
He did not come. Onto the stage of night
instead in hurried anxious midnight flight
two city geese swept overhead, their noise
like truant schoolboys in escape –
their pockets full of stolen sweets.
Just the two of them, their flight so low
and no formation following. Perhaps,
a courting pair and I had missed the synchronizing hink
absorbed into the gander’s honk.
One anserine voice,
a sonic metaphor of love beneath the moon.
