Haddon Hall by Brent Wiggans |
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FACING ARIDITY
by Diana Woodcock "Do not divert your love from visible/ things. But go on loving what is good,/ simple and ordinary—animals and/ flowers, and keep the balance true." —Rainer Maria Rilke Home again, I unpack the sounds, close my eyes and listen till I'm back among anhingas, little green and cricket frogs, bellowing alligators, a thunderstorm. First one set aside to preserve biological (not geological) resources, it'll flow now through my veins like honey, like streams in a desert—in this dot of a desert, finger pointing into the Arabian Sea. Everglades nourishing me as it does wading birds in the sawgrass sea, fresh water meandering southward toward Florida Bay. Back among Islamic mosaics, I now treasure another kind: of ponds and sloughs, hardwood hammocks, sawgrass marshes— fragile wetlands for endangered manatee, wood stork, Florida panther, Cape Sable seaside sparrow. Thunder peals as ibis, herons, spoonbills spill over Eco Pond. Subtropical wonderland sounds to refresh my withering soul. National treasure, delicate ecosystem of unsurpassable diversity, help me face aridity and keep the balance true. |
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SUGAR PLANTATION
by Patricia Hickerson they bring them in, the slaves to huts of wattle and thatch to cut cane cane of joy cane to punish see to the cane here are your clothes jackets and drawers petticoats check frock and trousers straw hat that's what you wear eat salt pork and plantains yams and codfish here are the fields of cane this is what you do Jamaica the sad land money land Barrett land at Cinnamon Hill land of rebel slaves, slave riots she said I will never go to Jamaica to make sugar cane or bathe in a spa nor write poetry 'til the slaves are freed no, said Elizabeth Barrett Browning of 50 Wimpole Street, London, slave to her widowed father small dark woman Portuguese lips, black curly hair— rich from sugar cane made poetry spaniel Flush at her bedside poetry read beyond Jamaica and Wimpole Street slave to poor health and opiates said no to her father she did—slave… slave to love, wife of Robert, mother of Pan, she the Pan poet descendant of slave slave who wrote the dark poetry of sugar cane |
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