Three Poems for Binney Hill Wilderness Preserve and Northeast Wilderness Trust
by Rachelle Parker
Jun 2021
Do Not Look The Journey in the Eye
When you arrive, you know that faith is baby steps. It is running with dogs at your heels and jumping into a pond without knowing how to swim. Strokes come from instinct. Taking in air when you can until you are back safely on land. Your dress clinging to skin weary of a season change. Feet will know the ground is cooler. Lungs will know the air is cooler. Blood will run cooler. Your grandmothers’ grandmothers have whispered. A black spruce will offer its trunk and branch for rest and shade and a collection of seeds. Blueberries will be easy pickings for fingers scarred by a cutter. Loopers will die off without the overseer of tobacco.
Run to cooler land
Loopers no longer hold you back
Grandmothers know what’s ahead
There Were No Yellow Triangles, Just Da Moss
Could a been moose dung
A spring, waitin’ to be drunk
Maple leaves gorged on early snow
Ferns sproutin’ from underneath a big ole rock
Spores on a birch what look like Chesapeake oysters
Starlings makin’ due with this new nest, home
New bugs thirstin’ for your hide, too
Echoes of momma callin’ out
Black spruce
Silver trout
Cool air
Deep breathes
Scabbed fingers, from the cutter, picking…
Blueberries
North Side of the Juniper
Look for the half frozen pond.
Moss will be damp on the north side of the juniper.
There will be birds and otters and snakes,
singing your arrival, chirping and splashing and slithering.
Stems and twigs in their mouths to build a dam,
follow the beaver until he disappears
behind a waterfall. It will be dry there.
The darkness of a cave will cradle you,
move you to tears and sleep.
A peek of morning lights your way through dewed grasses
to the blueberries. Fill your kerchief with their wildness.
Munch these new fruits, let their juices
run through your raisin’d skin until plump.
You bursting at the seams and left bare.
Go when the silver fins beckon you.
They know how deep down the earth is.
They have laid eggs there.
Slowly enter the pond. Slowly dip your head
under. Slowly release the dust from bitter
wounds, from thick keloids at the wrists
and ankles, from the mark under your eye
left by a fetterbush.
Cleansed, sit on the bank, look at your reflection
See the return of the gazelle.
Rachelle Parker was selected winner of the Furious Flower Poetry Prize at James Madison University and won third prize in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award in 2020. Rachelle is a fellow of Tin House Summer Workshop Poetry and Callaloo Creative Writing at Brown University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in About Place Journal, Rhino Poetry, Paterson Literary Review, The Adirondack Review and Tupelo Quarterly. She is also published in the anthology The BreakBeat Poets: Black Girl Magic. Her photographic work debuts in the Spring 2021 issue of Orion Magazine.
Northeast Wilderness Trust (newildernesstrust.org) is a non-profit land trust, founded in 2002 to fill the vacant niche of wilderness protection in the Northeast. Their mission is to conserve forever-wild landscapes for nature and people. To date, they have protected more than 41,000 forever-wild acres across New England and New York.