April 29: Greensickness

[Martha]

Greensickness
Laurel Chen

after Gwendolyn Brooks

My wild grief didn’t know where to end.
Everywhere I looked: a field alive and unburied.
Whole swaths of green swallowed the light.
All around me, the field was growing. I grew out
My hair in every direction. Let the sun freckle my face.
Even in the greenest depths, I crouched
Towards the light. That summer, everything grew
So alive and so alone. A world hushed in green.
Wildest grief grew inside out.

I crawled to the field’s edge, bruises blooming
In every crevice of my palms.
I didn’t know I’d reached a shoreline till I felt it
There: A salt wind lifted
The hair from my neck.
At the edge of every green lies an ocean.
When I saw that blue, I knew then:
This world will end.

Grief is not the only geography I know.
Every wound closes. Repair comes with sweetness,
Come spring. Every empire will fall:
I must believe this. I felt it
Somewhere in the field: my ancestors
Murmuring Go home, go home—soon, soon.
No country wants me back anymore and I’m okay.

If grief is love with nowhere to go, then
Oh, I’ve loved so immensely.
That summer, everything I touched
Was green. All bruises will fade
From green and blue to skin.
Let me grow through this green
And not drown in it.
Let me be lawless and beloved,
Ungovernable and unafraid.
Let me be brave enough to live here.
Let me be precise in my actions.
Let me feel hurt.
I know I can heal.
Let me try again—again and again.

--

From the author: "This poem was inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem 'To the Young Who Want to Die,’ which ends with the lines, ‘Graves grow no green that you can use. / Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.’ This poem articulates my belief that grief isn’t a dead thing; it’s very much alive and continues to shape how I grow and live in this world. This poem says: healing is forever, another world is possible, and no nation will protect us, only we will."

Today in: 

2024: from Gaza, Summer 2006, Jasmine Donahaye
2023: June, Alex Dimitrov
2022: Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be, Ross Gay
2021: Choi Jeong Min, Franny Choi
2020: Earl, Louis Jenkins
2019: Kul, Fatimah Asghar
2018: My Life Was the Size of My Life, Jane Hirshfield
2017: I Would Ask You To Reconsider The Idea That Things Are As Bad As They’ve Ever Been, Hanif Abdurraqib
2016: Tired, Langston Hughes
2015: Democracy, Langston Hughes
2014: Postscript, Seamus Heaney
2013: The Ghost of Frank O’Hara, John Yohe
2012: All Objects Reveal Something About the Body, Catie Rosemurgy
2011: Prayer, Marie Howe
2010: The Talker, Chelsea Rathburn
2009: There Are Many Theories About What Happened, John Gallagher
2008: bon bon il est un pays, Samuel Beckett
2007: Root root root for the home team, Bob Hicok
2006: Fever 103°, Sylvia Plath
2005: King Lear Considers What He’s Wrought, Melissa Kirsch

+ Today's poem: Greensickness, Laurel Chen