In her mostly white town, an hour from Rocky Mountain National Park, a black poet considers centuries of protests against racialized violence
Two miles into
the sky, the snow
builds a mountain
unto itself.
Some drifts can be
thirty feet high.
Picture a house.
Then bury it.
Plows come from both
ends of the road,
foot by foot, month
by month. This year
they didn’t meet
in the middle
until mid-June.
Maybe I’m not
expressing this
well. Every year,
snow erases
the highest road.
We must start near
the bottom and
plow toward each
other again.
Copyright © 2021 by Camille T. Dungy. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 20, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I drafted this poem while teaching as a staff poet at the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop, where all poets are asked to write a poem a day. I often find that the exhaustion that comes from maintaining a daily writing practice opens me to surprising and rewarding avenues of inquiry. The 4x4 structure I imposed on these lines and stanzas helped me whittle this poem down to what felt like its most necessary components.”
—Camille T. Dungy
Camille T. Dungy
Camille T. Dungy is the author of several books of poetry including, Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017). Dungy was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow and is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.