Deminer: one who removes explosive mines
About the pomegranate I must say
nothing, Pausanias wrote, for its story
is somewhat of a holy mystery.
Travel
writer from the second century CE,
he'd been to temples and tombs,
pyramids and ruins.
Did he ever pull
out the safety clip, peel back skin-
tight leather bodices for the winking
jewels nested
in those rooms? Together
but separate, kernel and pith; membrane
white as the snow that only a mother's
sorrow could spread
hard and brilliant upon
the earth. Would nothing grow as long
as she couldn't find a cellar door,
a staircase,
even some servant's
entrance whereby a rescue might
be engineered? We know daughters
are
hungry, as she once was; they'll put
things into their lipsticked mouths
not always thinking of the cost.
The goat will bleat
forlorn, above
ground: its hair, sheared ice;
droppings hard as stones.
In time,
some thaw could make the landscape
dangerous again. One day, you might
step on a burr or sweet
gum pod;
a land mine buried deep
in a shared prehistory.
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.