Letter to America
Where I walk the land is way-worn. The peregrine
swoops into coastal sagebrush, then pivots
through and upon the current, drifting in light—:
she circles out over and into her beach-bur nest,
makes herself into shadow that tenders her wild
and dusky knowledge, her mother-wit.
*
Wind, water, bush-whack, turf cutter, bog-hoe
once gouged these sandstone bluffs.
Late morning fog moves over round humps of chamise.
Children play beneath and pull at witches broom
under the bent pine. Their voices rise and vanish.
I would make of us good heart so we could move
these forms of wildness through our Constitution
and pull ourselves, rusted and begrimed,
toward purification. Just as climbing milkweed
on the coastline strata toughens into bloom,
so might we, stained and straggled by fierce weather,
climb up and into our history, look down its steep slant
and stop a while:
fetch home spiritual things.
Like wild clematis and cabbage, find the tawny
grammar that will hinge us to its spine.
In Eva Hooker’s first book, Godwit, she traced the migration patterns of a bird, collected wildflowers for semblances, and rooted around in the testimony of women mystics. Her poetry has been deeply affected by summers spent on Madeline Island in Lake Superior. She is writer-in-residence emerita at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana.
Read more poetry by Eva Hooker appearing in Terrain.org: “There is work to do within nothingness” and “Three Woodpeckers.”
Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header photo by Anna, courtesy Pixabay.
