stonepicnicking_okapi

From poets.org. The poem-of-the-day for 20 April. I included the 'about the poem' which I find interesting at the end. A nice feature of poets.org.

In her mostly white town, an hour from Rocky Mountain National Park, a black poet considers centuries of protests against racialized violence by Camille T. Dungy

Two miles into
the sky, the snow
builds a mountain
unto itself.

Some drifts can be
thirty feet high.
Picture a house.
Then bury it.

Plows come from both
ends of the road,
foot by foot, month
by month. This year

they didn’t meet
in the middle
until mid-June.
Maybe I’m not

expressing this
well. Every year,
snow erases
the highest road.

We must start near
the bottom and
plow toward each
other again.

“I drafted this poem while teaching as a staff poet at the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop, where all poets are asked to write a poem a day. I often find that the exhaustion that comes from maintaining a daily writing practice opens me to surprising and rewarding avenues of inquiry. The 4x4 structure I imposed on these lines and stanzas helped me whittle this poem down to what felt like its most necessary components.”
—Camille T. Dungy