Today we are staining
the fence a deep shade
of cedar, since the contractor
told us the three month period
of curing is over. What they mean
by curing is that the planks
of new-cut wood have been
left awhile to the elements,
have hardened a little more
after being left like that
by themselves. Soft
traces of green around the grain
have started to darken in spots:
meaning they've tasted equal
lashings of heat and rain,
plummeting cold, blue-
black wind. It's almost peaceful,
following the rhythm with each
pass of the roller and the brush.
But cure is also, in Medieval Latin,
curare—responsibility for souls; or
the restoration of the body to health.
No one in the world as of tonight
knows how to heal the sick,
the dying, the dead stacked in fields
for mass burial. One by one,
quarantined towns empty and citizens
retreat into isolation. In Lobpuri,
where tourists no longer come, bands
of monkeys have been seen fighting over
a scrap of food in the square.
But in Siena, one night the townspeople
open their windows and as if on accord,
begin singing "Canto della Verbena.”
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-2022). She is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.