Pine shadows on snow like a Jasper canvas,if only my pen equaled the downy’s stabbing beakthis January morning, her franticchipping, more resolve than frenzy, to make a feastof beetle larvae, if only my wood-boring eyescould interrogate the known like pillars of sunlightthrough fast-moving clouds scanning the sideof Corporation Mountain where on a distant ridgewhite plumes dissolve like theories. I cannot hearthrough winter’s quiet what’s worth saying.Saplings stand nude as Spartans awaiting orders.The entire forest is iced-up and glistening.Sealed in its form, the austere world I’ve cometo love beckons, earth runnels soon resurrectedinto a delirium of streams and wild fields. Till then,branches like black lines crisscrossing the sub-Arctic.
Ixxxi.
Feature Date
- July 26, 2023
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Copyright © 2023 by Major Jackson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Winter 2023
Sewanee, Tennessee
University of the South
Editor
Adam Ross
Managing Editor & Poetry Editor
Eric Smith
Assistant Editors
Hellen Wainaina
Jennie Vite
Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is the longest-running literary quarterly in America. The SR has published many of the twentieth century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, Seamus Heaney, Hannah Arendt, and Ezra Pound. The Review has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent, from excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor’s first novels to the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Christian Wiman. “Whatever the new literature turns out to be,” wrote editor Allen Tate in 1944, “ it will be the privilege of the Sewanee Review to print its share of it, to comment on it, and to try to understand it.” The mission remains unchanged.
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