Three Poems by Shauna M. Morgan



New Provisions 
    
I step through the yard, toes combing 
the damp grass, my feet in adjuration,
toward the provision ground where
plots of dirt darken beneath dew,
waiting for the sun to stretch  
this morning’s promise across the sky. 
 
I pull deeply a breath of life, 
as if this inspiring could make me 
understand what the air is whispering
about seeding and rooting, 
and when to ready the earth  
for planting in difficult soil. 
 
I close my eyes and see my sapling self, 
barefooted and eager, Madras shorts  
and slampatta shoes following my mother  
to pick limes and cherries and globe grapes 
at the arbor where the passion fruit vines
emigrate from the fence, tendrils hoping away. 
 
There are things I cannot grow in Kentucky. 
St. Julian mangoes, East Indian, Sweetie, Number 11.
A daughter between worlds of love and longing.
Heliconia rostrata, a home for hummingbirds  
and grandmother stories climbing  
the red dais of some distant past. 
 
But just beyond the callaloo, okra, and scotch bonnet 
is a summer sanctuary where I harvest daily, 
where blackberry bush thorns make a tartan of my arm,
like a memory marking my flesh, a heritage newly freed,  
like maypops and their purple flowers,  
Passiflora incarnata, fruiting anew.


*


Arch 
Natural Bridge, Carter County, Kentucky 
 
We ascend, memory a guidepost, history a trail map,
feet sinking into winter mud as we cross into wood. 
 
Flinting to fire, my thighs chide me for not loving 
the width of their proud spread, skin a story book 
 
trail, blood forking to red creeks above my knees.  
Today, I am alive. The rise and fall of my breasts,  
 
still proud in their new humility, force me to pace  
my breath. I was green once, giggling in the mirror,  
 
paw-paw buds stiff and new. Stepping over moss  
and fern, a verdant hopscotch, my chest reminds me, 
 
anticipation is everywhere as the wind grabs a hum  
rising to song, an embrace breezing us, inspiring 
 
my lungs ablaze in gratitude. The body carries me, 
along this arch, bridge of stone like the crossing  
 
on my back, spirit world to night dream, many selves 
finding one another here, heavy with the future. 


*

Another Season 
 
Riven by beetle and moth, the callaloo and cabbage
sieve sunlight, their green leaves a daybreak colander
sending flecks of gold and shadow into the soil. 
 
The still-flowering tower of okra sways the truth  
of my inattention, its woodened fruit cracked past
harvesting time, turn and split to seed again. 
 
Left to bear witness, the brittle vines of cucumber 
and squash languish above the powdery dirt made 
ashen by diseased leaves and decaying fruit. 
I have not attended to the rituals of dead things. 
   
Beyond the plot, persistent tomatoes keep guard. 
Little renegades bearing from all the pebbly places
they planted themselves. There are lessons here. 
 
I reach through the leafy lattice to clasp a vine.  
The scarlet sweets, releasing easily, leave me  
wondering at the effort, the letting go,  
 
leave me longing to settle my mourning, fearing  
I will find my newly-dead brother’s face composting 
in time, his hale hands wilting like the grape’s  
slim scion, a galled and darkening root. 

Shauna M. Morgan is a poet-scholar and Associate Professor of creative writing and Africana literature at the University of Kentucky. Her critical work has been published in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, South Atlantic Review, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared in A Gathering Together, Interviewing the Caribbean, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, among other periodicals and anthologies. Her third chapbook, Fear of Dogs & Other Animals, was published by Central Square Press. Shauna tends a small, hopeful provision ground at her home in the East End Artists’ Village in Lexington, and she continues to explore the environmental and cultural linkages between her rural Afro-Indo-Jamaican upbringing and her US-Kentucky life. 


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