by KJ Hannah Greenberg
Under the Tamaracks
My eyes are worn
and so it’s hard to see
the tips of green
emerging.
I think it could be
cones: male, female.
It could be needles,
fascicle prongs of green,
I think unfurling, but that is wrong.
Leaves unfurl and needles pierce,
pricking into spring.
I bend the lowest branch
to peer at little pots
of promise circling,
thimbles of bark charmed
by the lengthening light
to open like barnacles or tiny
sepia chrysanthemums.
It is so slow.
This greening. And I know
it will shift so fast once begun
and I know it is a cycle. But oh!
to be there for the first time,
not run ahead, plan, predict,
a virtual image in my head, a guide
for the unfolding. But to hold
each opening as fresh and new, wonder
at what will come, wait
for each single nubbin
to explode into what it is.
To watch with ancient eyes
and be surprised
again.
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes and caregivers on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people (Ottawa, Canada). Thanks to Firefly Creative, Merritt Writers, and not-the-rodeo poets, she has work out/forthcoming in Citron Review, One Art, Pinhole Poetry, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, and Waterwheel Review. Twitter: @nancyhuggett Instagram: @nanhug Facebook: www.facebook.com/nancy.huggett.35 https://linktr.ee/nancyhuggett.
KJ Hannah Greenberg tilts at social ills and encourages personal evolutions via poetry, prose, and visual art. Her images have appeared as interior art in many places, including Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, Les Femmes Folles, Mused, Piker Press, The Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Front Porch Review, and Yellow Mama and as cover art in many places, including Angime, Black Petals, Door is A Jar Literary Magazine [sic], Impspired [sic], Pithead Chapel, Red Flag Poetry, Right Hand Pointing, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, The Broken City, Torah Tidbits and Yellow Mama. Additionally, some of her digital paintings are featured alongside of her poetry in One-Handed Pianist (Hekate Publishing, 2021).