that color is not color. The red flower,she tells me, absorbs all lightbut red, so reflects redwhere she and I can see it.Daughter, I call her, Pulseof Light, Prism of Many Faces I Know,so many I don’t.You are Particular, Waveof the one, deepocean. And she absorbs it all,except daughter — which reflects backto my eye, radiant and factualas any prayer, namedfor the very thing it cannot hold.
Somewhere, she’s learned
Leah Naomi Green
Feature Date
- July 31, 2022
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Copyright © 2022 by Leah Naomi Green.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Leah Naomi Green is the author of The More Extravagant Feast (Graywolf Press), selected by Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and named “one of the best books of 2020” by The Boston Globe. She received the 2021 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award for compassion, courage, truth-telling, and commitment to justice, as well an Academy of American Poets 2021 Climate Action Poetry Prize. Green teaches environmental studies and English at Washington and Lee University. She lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia where she and her family homestead and grow or find much of their food for the year.
Spring 2022
Charlottesville, Virginia
University of Virginia
Editor
Paul Reyes
Publisher & Executive Editor
Allison Wright
Poetry Editor
Gregory Pardlo
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