From the Wilderness, with Love

1 Comment

1. 

   Nancy Anne Miller on April 29, 2019 at 6:21 am

   Dear Adam,
   Thank you for this. Vegetable Seller Barbados made me remember a poem in my first collection Somersault, titled Take This Back:

   Take This Back

   Take this back to Devon
   England, the homeland you
   left to photograph me here
   balancing fruit on my head.

   Shall we title the autochrome
   market woman? It will
   please your wife in her crisscrossed
   corset laced like an extra spine.

   The stiff armour turning flesh
   into an insect’s taut abdomen,
   a Wasp’s precise profile.
   So take it back, a small stamp

   stored in your thick album,
   she will lift a magnifying glass
   to make me surface within
   the blur of its round net.

   As she looks with a Cyclops eye,
   won’t she think my bananas
   curl in rows, like a large
   feather on a garden party hat?

   I share it with you writer to writer in gratitude for your brilliant piece. It seems as if Un-Naming is an important part of the ability to Name. May we writers and poets be so engaged in this arduous and exciting process!
   Nancy

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