THERE'S A POEM
FROM A NEW MANUSCRIPT CALLED
"THE NEXT WORLD,"
IN THE FAREWELL ISSUE OF
THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POETRY
(which includes work from Simon Anton Nino Diego Baena, David Chorlton, Sheila D. Landre, Gary Soto, Mattie Quesenberry Smith, and Samantha Samakande, among many, many others.)
YOU CAN FIND THE POEM
The manuscript THE NEXT WORLD was started in September 2021.
The poems gathered in it are pretty much all of a piece - about loss, the loss of much of the natural world, seasonal cycles, and the grief process that will take place between this collapsing world and the next world.
I see the grief process as a journey made from one identity to another. When we lose something that was a part of us, there is a felt absence (think in terms of a lost limb); a hole, a void. And many times, the question arises – who am I now?
Something is missing, something that was a huge part of who we thought we were, and we must begin the long, hard process of forging a new identity out of that loss.
With that in mind, we are moving into an entirely new world – it has already begun – there is no stopping significant and catastrophic changes to the environment and our lives through climate change. It is too late to stop it, even if we halted all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow.
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This poem is about a swamp in Northern Florida where I fished, played, and daydreamed as a child. It was a dangerous place (venomous snakes). It was also a safe space, far from most human beings, especially adults. I have carried that swamp with me my entire life.
That swamp was dredged for suburban houses in the 80’s. Disappeared.
Dredging that swamp dredged emotions out of the gut so that my body sometimes rings hollow when someone touches it.
Numbness. Panic. Dread.
This is happening to us all.
So, how do we forge a new identity as a culture, as a civilization, in the face of this massive death and destruction?
What do we hold on to, what do we leave behind?
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A Snake, A Root, A Shoe Lace:
how the world was made
The moccasin created black water in order to move
secretly from one dark world to another. You know this.
I know this, too. This knowledge plays dodge and
weave in the chambers of the heart. It’s automatic, so
there’s no need to keep time. Systolic. Diastolic. Blood
moves through black water thin with a graceful lazy
motion…
The rest of the poem can be found here.
