ON BUYING A ROSE
How can Black people write about flowers at a time like this
—Hanif Abdurraqib
1
If niggerweed
or nigger head, could I then? If nigger root or
Kara’s lynching trees
and her thorn-fanged cotton bolls, if the hands of state prisoners—Black hands
Black backs—potting bluestem
for highway beautification, could I? At a time like this,
do I dare, do I
dare—can brown skin care about a night-blooming cereus or
vines rooting in a mayonnaise jar
atop the kitchen table,
Black women raising roses
bigga-round as pie plates. Gotta have something,
Gotta have something
to lift the spirit. Mama’s spiritual. Mama’s holler: Gotta have something.
2
And the flowers where you live—the small dark flowers
where you live—cut, broken, taken too soon?
Street grief and asphalt eulogies—
sunflowers and roses wrapped in cellophane
beside teddy bears
holding red hearts, beside the fluttering votive candles,
cardboard sympathy. Flowers, all the flowers,
taken too soon, too soon.
and marveling
beheld at last the achieved
flower
—Robert Hayden
3
Achieve, as Hayden said, achieve a flower.
As if someone’s going to grant a black woman
anything beautiful.
Don’t wait for someone else to do it, she always said.
A white gardenia beside Lady Day’s brow,
beauty doin’ its best work: hiding the injury.
Plant a little sedum, it doesn’t take
a whole lot of work.
Gotta have something, chil’.
Gotta have something.
4
Beside the hostas and daylilies,
a handmade placard: Black Lives Matter.
’65 and white lei around the necks of marchers,
all the way to Selma, shining, shining.
Beauty’s best work. Beauty’s best work.
But I digress, I meant if—
if Basquiat’s Ass Killer, his razorwire petals,
brokeglass petals and crazed light, or that rose
that Tupac grew from concrete
could I, could I, could I,
could I have something, flowers,
for a time like this?
BEFORE SUNDOWN
Stunned by wings
spanning six feet or more,
banked
into spiraling glides.
Below, a monarch slants
over panicles of bluestem and tilts
its wings to mimic.
The sign says: once there were buffalo: I-74
carved by hooves and hunger that grazed a continent for pasture.
*
September
and the grasses rise
woman-high, green legions.
Just after dawn, I walk through restored prairie.
But if I came after dark?
Grandview, Lakeview, Timberview, Whisper Meadow,
neighborhood watches and cul de sacs,
my dark shadow over white pavement.
A buckeye unspools its tongue into a mash of shit.
How closely foul and fair reside, sustained by the same fodders.
Prairies loved the buffalo’s excreta.
But it’s a pleasant morning.
And I give the pleasant greetings
that any Midwesterner gives.
They do the same.
How pleasantly we shine,
above our tangled roots.
There are three turkey buzzards now.
TURNING INTO A PRAIRIE
after Gerald Stern
A pond? Perhaps—
but I would pick a prairie
and a morning like this when the mists rise
like confirmation girls in laced bobby socks,
each one a votive candle.
A reconstruction of prairie, a black soil prairie. I go out
and walk between grassy stands and parasols of indigo,
to stand as startled whitetail do, stilled wary
I remove my shoes and clothing pluck the baubles
from my ears, drop my glasses, and push rough heels
against the hard ground to plow my toes into sod.
At last I feel my body giving in, entering the darkness
like a root: slow arduous work, tedious.
Broken wrack, broken bottles, toxic trickle and plastic.
Ulna, radius, spine the pelvic cradle softens
and slips. My skin scraped, molts. I slip earthward.
I know now what the prairie kingsnake knows, the glass lizard,
and the skink. But I do not fear the hawk’s keening.
I am grass and root and loam. A vole tunnels in my throat.
Field mice bed inside my womb. Hair, limbs,
fingers lengthen and rise, lengthen and slender into turkeyfoot
and stands of Indiangrass. A vixen makes her den
between the grassy swells that once were breast.
This kettle hole shaped my unturned skull,
this ephemeral pond (mosquitoes, striders, azure bluets)
once my chambered heart. And that grey, long-necked bird
with its skewered beak is inwardness, newly winged,
an ugly noise, aw-k, then gone. Silence returns, still wary.
Janice N. Harrington’s latest book of poetry is Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin
(BOA Editions). She teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois, @IllinoisCRWR
Photo by Jonathan Petersson from Pexels