What is the Grass?
The child asks, bringing it to me in handfuls.
We stop at the Walt Whitman Service Area—
No sign of Him save some “Democratic Vistas”
& “Drum Taps” on a plaque near the Micky D’s
Let’s go find the grass
I say to my two-year-old beauty and
We pick one blade from the median
Then back we go in the forever car
Hours later, pulling into Richmond
She, half awake in my arms mumbles
Let’s go find the grass
Copyright © 2014 by Lee Ann Brown. Used with permission of the author.
“This snapshot poem’s title is taken from Whitman’s ever-generative ‘Song of Myself,’ when a child asks a question that grows into Leaves of Grass. My poem answers from the middle of the mother-daughter dyad, touching on a new human’s relation to memory, dream and the shared hunger for a lullaby of green amidst the cloned cookie-cutter rest stops of modern America.”
—Lee Ann Brown
Lee Ann Brown
Lee Ann Brown was born in Japan and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is the author of In the Laurels, Caught (Fence Books, 2013), which won the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series Award, as well as Crowns of Charlotte (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan, 2003), and Polyverse (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), which won the 1996 New American Poetry Competition.