There is no outside of nature. –Ed Roberson
& sit with the collapse. Forget who I am
while in an office too far above the soil.
I sit at a desk writing words – insisting
to find meaning elsewhere on a page insisting to be
& not see what has been forgotten.
Our elders the Bald Cypress trees
standing generations wide & tall
in low swampy water, that is too my body.
My body, the tree, & my body, the water
a crosshatch of generations South
across time, in time, through time.
I will call this history a verb of light or a home within a hand
pointing north like the winter thinned branches
poking the sky from a view on my back stoop.
Nature renames meaning for a home.
Where my toes feel the morning sun against cool grass
& I become the mama bird bringing cotton balls
from someone’s trash up the street,
to a nest higher than my memory of self.
Every morning, those smaller birds sing me awake,
declaring I must be careful – be careful
of times you choose to remember
& when you choose not to see yourself
elemental. And then they tell me
to think of her too; the Mississippi River
her wide tongue sketching a new portrait
licking the coastal bed clean; procreant.
Remember, they say, when collective souls once moved deep
down the River in ancestral sound of themselves?
Their prayers beyond, beyond –
approaching lands echoing their call
& just for a split second their golden-brown faces lifted,
feeling the warmth of a rising sun
& grew wings like southern monarchs
to fly beyond, beyond insisting on home.
