Love Poem in the Black Field
Parchman Farm Chain Gang, Sunflower County Mississippi, 1911
How long since my left foot has known a day
It did not spend drug along by your right? Since the first
Rust-iron rattlers made fields of cattails kneel, fronds
Curdling like browlines in brutal heat? I forget
My name, its sins, when I march behind you. I know nothing
Of before. Nothing but your nape, its tributary of creases;
But your gait, pressing smooth miles of streetside weeds.
What else can a lonesome roadboy do but look
At the one to his front: you, with keloid scars inside
Even your ears, you with long lashes that, when blinked,
Seem heavier than these chains, all the men they carry.
What I wouldn’t give to see your eyes open again
After that brief, merciful closing. What I don’t have
to give. What I know, if I did, I would.
Copyright © 2023 by Ariana Benson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 8, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This piece is one in a suite of ‘Love Poem[s] in the Black Field,’ which arose from an obsession with understanding how, despite all that our forebears endured, our love, in all that it is, survived. And I am very certain it did survive, our love. I am proof of its existence. So, I found myself conjuring scenes like this one—a man hitched to a chain, longing for the simple intimacy of a met gaze—moments in which this love may have flourished, if only briefly; may have sown seeds beneath two paramours’ feet, knowing it would have to winter awhile before reemerging.”
—Ariana Benson
Ariana Benson
Ariana Benson was born in Norfolk, Virginia. She graduated from Spelman College and holds MA degrees in both poetic practice and scriptwriting, which she earned as a Marshall Scholar.