Three Sample Poems
Blood Meal
I eat of lemon bacopa.
The mosquito drinks my blood.
My eating is ritual.
Her eating is life.
No difference.
We do what we must.
She pollinates the orchid,
lays her eggs.
I look for myself
blooming in the branches.
Wilderness
From a wide domesticated expanse–
neatly tame and furrowed rows,
tomatoes, beans, obedient fields,
this remnant of wildness rises.
Cross over a boundary and there you are
in some lush unfettered flourishing.
Then you know
what the plow turns under
what the traffic kills.
I Came to the Everglades with a Grief
This is what I have learned: weeping for beauty
replaces weeping for grief. Stunned at first
by the blue heron’s crest, the purple gallinule’s
irridescence, grief now creeps as surely forward
as this subtle river of grass flows south.
It goes about its quiet work stealthy
as the yellow panther in the understory,
necessary, as everything here is necessary
each to the other in a complex ecology.
Yesterday, only once I felt it moving. It lifted
like a bird from the expanse of sawgrass,
startled me. I had stopped looking for it.
This grief is learning to ride the anhinga, glide
and flap through forgiving air. It lands in bark-stained
water, dives beneath the surface, swims–I see it there,
indistinct shape, a quivering blur. On the bank,
the gator’s black back stretched in sun
amazes me, makes me think that I can touch
a fine living leather with claws and teeth.
–Anne McCrary Sullivan
Ecology II: Throat Song from the Everglades
“I Came to the Everglades with a Grief” appeared first in the Southern Review (40.2)
