Land Lessons

By Kari Gunter-Seymour

She’s lived here all her life,
a gift to know this land, its seasons,
tastes, smells, mindful of its wants—
even knowing every acre was once taken
by violence. We all have mortifications,
history’s footprints threaded among the trees.

From the porch, sunset paints the surface
of the pond, pregnant with twigs
and twitching insects, a Gaia of breeze
strums shuffled reeds.
She’s had a good cry, one that could
have left a lesser woman sharp-cornered.

Later she will wash the dishes,
her face splashed and wakened,
her life unremarkable as the house fly
balanced on her dinner plate,
rubbing its bristly bowed legs together.

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Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and a recipient of a 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship Grant. Her poetry collections include Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022) and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions, 2020), winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, World Literature Today, The New York Times, and Poets.org.

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