awaiting a carriage, any
it’s the numerous letters the magnolias make
as they open—one, then another, and then
a letter i don’t quite know yet—that makes any wounded
heart seem more wounded and, despite its chances,
not worth the time. i thought i’d be used to it
by now. i stood in the greening field, i famously
like to recount, and waved my arms
so i could, at last, be claimed, be carried away.
but nothing good descended. no avian form,
no cloud, just a swarm of blue things:
flung twilight, withdrawal, an opal blame.
sure, i’ve been lonely before, i always say, but not
like this. you have to survive the bad season
to make it to the season of reversals, the magnolias
leading the fray. though that’s not
what we call it, at least not where i’m from
where there is a single, impenetrable era
that begins just as soon as it ends.
Copyright © 2022 by Bernard Ferguson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 12, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Sometimes, the only way to end one life and begin a better one is for your loved ones, all of them, to betray you. Betrayal arrived for me in Spring 2021 and, some days, dazed by it, all I could do was wander through Prospect Park and marvel—I could still marvel—at the magnolias leading the charge, reversing all of winter’s wounds. This poem was some of the only language I was able to utter while inside that era of dizziness and loss.”
—Bernard Ferguson
b ferguson
b ferguson is a queer Bahamian poet and the author of The Climate Sirens (Graywolf, 2024). The recipient of prizes and fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, 92nd Street Y, The Cincinnati Review, The Breakwater Review, The Adroit Journal, Atlantic Center for the Arts, New York University’s Global Research Initiative, and New York University’s Writers in the Public Schools, they live on Lenapehoking.