As this season ripens...

What might inspire your prose poem?

Dear Friends,

How are your hearts? It’s been quite a full month here, one where transition and change seem to be gently persistent calls for me to be as fully present as possible. To my children. My home. To relationships. Which, of course, is really a call for me to be present to my own self as I attempt to tend to the people and places of my life with great care. For me this looks like paying attention to the very simple, but sometimes overlooked, animal-needs of my body. Did I drink enough water? Did I enjoy some moments in fresh air and sunshine? Did I move in ways that felt good? Did I experience pleasure? Did I allow myself enough rest?

This is also the month of my mother’s “death anniversary.” It’s only been two years, and I’m still learning how to let grief surface, and in the motion of that rising, joy manages to surface, too. More often than not, I am struck by the beauty of the natural world, the fact that I am still alive to witness it, to be a part of it…to be alive with it. It might be the partnership I’m growing the most curious about lately. What responsibility do I have to the land that sustains me? Can I offer it better care? How do I belong to it? Anyway, just things I’m mulling over these days. (And beginning to find some answers in Wild Abundance’s Online Gardening School.)

I wrote the following bit of a prose poem a few years ago, as an ode to the earth and also my mother. It seemed to make sense to share it now. You can listen to me read it, below.

Is there someone or something you might write an ode for?

Thanks for sharing some space with me today.

Take Heart,

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An Ode for Mother

If I were an eastern hemlock, rooted in one of Southern Appalachia’s shady coves, my growth a pondering, 800 year-long ascent, would I then know how to face a mother’s death?

It seems both sorrow and joy originate from the same place in my body, a space just above my breastbone where the swell stems, and there are times when I cannot tell the difference. If I were a hemlock, the soft quills of my branches gently raised skyward, I would know how to live evergreen, even as the world around me fell into the ground, again and again. Each time she calls, I wonder if it will be the last time I feel the geography of her voice. If I were a hemlock, I might remember when the chestnut trees blanketed the mountains, each a queen, a generous splendor in the territory of forest. The blight that stole the chestnuts from us, is the cancer living in her bones.

But what of the persimmon living on the forest edges, the bearer of sunset sweet fruit? She modeled the beauty of how to move with the wind, a gift passed to me, a sugarplum in my hand. The persimmons understand ornament just as well as nourishment, the way fruit hanging longest on the branch is better to taste. I will let this season ripen with my presence.

The tulip poplar haunts such places as bog edges and ravines, the magnolia a gem of welcome to hummingbirds. We welcomed strangers to our home, hospitality the burrow of my spirituality. Sacrificing its dark heartwood, poplars become servants of music, tenderly ruined, crafted into dulcimers and fiddles. If I were a poplar, I’d understand the sacrifices of the heart, the way being carved open allows a refrain to emerge: Sorrow and joy live intertwined.     

Author’s note: The descriptions of each tree were inspired by, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, edited by Rose McLarney and Laura-Gray Street.

*Mom, as a young girl, picking peaches in her backyard

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P.S.

1. Have you seen the movie Nine Days? Just gorgeous. Its take on before-life, and subsequently, death, moved me in ways I’m still unpacking. Zazie Beetz (maybe best known, at least to me anyway, for her role alongside Donald Glover in Atlanta) is luminous in it.

2. I also just picked up “Already Free” by Bruce Tift, based on the recommendation of adrienne maree brown. Liberation, always.

I made a butternut squash pasta casserole with sage chicken, peas, a béchamel sauce, and lots and lots of English coastal cheddar. It was a hit with the friends I gave it to…they started calling it the “jasserole” which made me exceedingly happy 😊

Maybe you’ll throw together something similarly autumnal together soon?

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P.P.S

I’ve got an essay in the forthcoming, Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic. You can pre-order it now!