Three Poems
Katrine Noer / Connected Archives
Camille T. Dungy is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently, America, A Love Story; the memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden; and a collection of personal essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers. She is also the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and co-editor of the From the Fishouse poetry anthology. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry; 100 Best African American Poems; Best American Essays; The 1619 Project; All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis; and over fifty other anthologies; as well as in The New Yorker; Poetry; Literary Hub; Paris Review; and Poets.org. Her honors include an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, two NAACP Image Award nominations, the Colorado Book Award, a California Book Award silver medal, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a distinguished professor in the English Department at Colorado State University and the poetry editor at Orion Magazine.
South of Hollywood / In the OC: A Brown Girl Remembers
leaves did not fall there in fall because there was not really
fall there sometimes rain slicked hightrafficked roads
and they called the rain season winter and sometimes
parching dust blew in on hot wind though they didn’t think
of that time as a season they called it always summer there
always spring called it always could be sunshine bright
grave markers they laid flat like steppingstones
on greengreengreengreen lawns so we drove by
graveyards we weren’t supposed to notice because
they needed to believe everything always stayed alive
there flowersflowersflowers always open on stalks so many
bushes burning with pinkyellowwhite blooms all those
trees festooned with red and purple paperthin petals I lived
there from two and never saw a hearse until I was a childwoman
with my first small breasts and monthly blood didn’t
know how a body could go when a body went nothing
for reference no upright headstones not even trees
showed me what letting go of the dying looked like no
one around looking old even no everyone sosososo
beautifully young in that place with no fall no real
winter where berries swelled all year olives ripened stone
fruit sometimes dripped from even burst on the trees
Two Ways
Someone just powered up a weed whacker outside.
The two-stroke motor growls and curses. The motor, amplified,
screams. Now is the season for weed whackers.
For push or riding mowers running over and over
neat lawns. Inside my house, inside my body, the noise is so loud
the crowns on my molars vibrate. The vibrations hurt
the backs of my eyes. Goodbye spring and hello summer.
Hello migraine. Hello allergies. In the middle, or maybe
the beginning of the American Century, nurseries began, almost
exclusively, to breed male trees. Females bear fruit, leave stains
on sidewalks. City planners have no time for messy females.
Now the air is puffed thick with male trees’ pollen.
Hello allergies. One machine stops and another begins. Still,
all those fruitless trees drop their leaves in the fall.
They slick up walkways. Dangerous heaps of brown
many hate. Fall is the season for leaf blowers. Where I live
there’s never a quiet season. In winter, while plants regain strength
to grow into their own cycles of desire, snowblowers kick on.
One machine stops and another begins. Trim season. Mow
season. Blow season. Push season. Then start each motor
all over again. The machines take my body. It hurts.
The body thirsts and it hungers. It forgets there is another way.
Let grass grow into a soft rustle. Let weeds flower
into a gentle array. Let fruit grow and let plants go
to seed. Let leaves fall. Let them fall. Let them stay. Let them soften,
in slow time. Before and under and after the silencing snow.
Late Summer Then Blink and It’s Fall
—for Callie, moving out at fourteen
I gathered the flowers
that leaned over
our walkway
like some drowsy
headstrong child.
I thought I would build
a bouquet
to grace
our kitchen table.
But then I saw a nest
those two wrens wove
this spring
sagging off a branch
in the cedar. Empty
now. Already
I have changed
my mind.
I gave them away.
Every bloom.
Every flower.
Reflecting a world where snow no longer arrives, annual migrations fall out of time, yet first blossoms still burst, Seasons, our sixth print edition, moves through three themes: requiem, invitation, and celebration—each a contemplation on the paradoxical ways the seasons now beckon us into intimate relationship.
