Pheasant and nuthatch, five-petaled flower, emerald feather suspended in veils—we don’t know how long the world can hold such specimens of tenderness, how farthe glacial drifts can ferry such tombs, immaculate, before they themselves turninto ghosts—Everything writhes before the dream discards what it calculates for reduction:and yet the yucca moth delivers its eggs inside the flower, even as leaves sharpentheir bayonet-points. At dusk, we scan the horizon for anchors and tents; we lean into the windhungry for the brass tinkle of hawk bells and the trance-like drone of hegelung.If we split these reeds down their length, how many of us can ride out the coming floodbefore sunlight returns or we’ve softened into moss?
Caulbearer
Yucca brevifolia
Feature Date
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“Caulbearer” from Caulbearer by Luisa A. Igloria.
Published by Black Lawrence Press in August, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Luisa A. Igloria.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2023 Immigrant Series Prize for poetry (Black Lawrence Press) for Caulbearer (2024). She is the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize, Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), and 12 other books. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize, UK—the world’s first major award for ecopoetry (now known as the Ginkgo Prize), selected by a panel headed by former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. She is lead editor, along with co-editors Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman, of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press, September 2023). Luisa is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University; she also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. During her appointed term as 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded her one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, to support a program of public poetry projects.
www.luisaigloria.com
https://linktr.ee/thepoetslizard
"In this rapturous collection, Luisa A. Igloria maps sacred ecologies, violent histories, extracted geologies, and multispecies relations. Throughout, there is both praise and grief, as well as a desire to mouth nostalgia and feel the world before it is indelibly changed. Caulbearer invites us to witness the 'unbearable cascade of beauty,' from the celestial birth and death of stars to the yucca moth laying eggs inside a flower. These poems reckon a salty truth: 'we don’t know how long the world can hold / such specimens of tenderness.'"
— Craig Santos Perez
"In these remarkable poems, Luisa A. Igloria honors the gifts of nature and the chance to explore the fullness of our lives in partnership with the natural world even while lamenting the inevitability of its loss. Underscoring this environmental pain is the colonial harm enacted to a place and its people, to the land and the sea; all the while, the earth becomes a vessel for the grief we leave behind. Igloria perceptively threads past, present, and future—rich and beautifully textured—to humble us to the fragility of our existence."
— Mai Der Vang
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
