In the still morning when you move
toward me in sleep for love,
I dream of
an island where long-stemmed cranes,
serious weather vanes,
turn slowly on one
foot. There the dragonfly folds
his mica wings and rides
the tall reed
close as a handle. The hippo yawns,
nods to thick pythons,
slack and drowsy, who droop down
like untied sashes
from the trees. The brash
hyenas do not cackle
and run but lie with their paws
on their heads like dogs.
The lazy crow’s caw
falls like a sigh. In the field
below, the fat moles build
their dull passage with an old
instinct that needs
no light or waking; its slow beat
turns the hand in sleep
as we turn toward each other
in the ripe air of summer,
before the change of weather,
before the heavy drop
of the apples.
Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Tropics” from Claiming Kin. Copyright © 1976 by Ellen Bryant Voigt. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress.
Source:
Claiming Kin (1976)
Ellen Bryant Voigt has lived in Vermont for many years; she spent her childhood in rural Virginia, where she grew up on her family’s farm. Her poems traverse the worlds of motherhood, the rural South, family, and music. Her 1995 collection Kyrie: Poems is a book-length sonnet sequence exploring the lives of people affected by the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919. Poet Edward Hirsch wrote of her early book, Claiming Kin (1976), . . .
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Poems by Ellen Bryant Voigt
