by Rose Johnson (’24)
Dwelling
Do you recall
The tidied-up, button-shined front yard
That you played upon for seven summers,
Shaped-round by an ugly thick-wire fence,
With a young, leaf-bespattered poplar tree
Intertwined about one of its posts?
Think of it:
The tree, once,
Biding its time,
Under the earth,
Listening, hushed,
Ear-pressed to the soil,
Knowing,
The moment to break forth is nigh.
And suddenly, affronted
By shining steel
An inverted eruption
Point driven deftly into the heavy earth.
Its tawny innards
Slashed almost clean through.
Resin leaking out slowly,
Weak and thin,
Too watery for blood.
This ignorant act
Makes the silver and green Muses
Weepish.
They press their hands against the atmosphere.
They only understand their own violence,
Never anyone else’s.
But they laugh despite everything.
They always have.
And what can the poplar do,
But gather itself around the violence,
And grow?
Dilluted
I want to be bigger than now.
To stretch out sideways,
Pressing ‘round it all.
I want to dilute it within me.
To walk in empty, worn-out fields.
Let them widen my consciousness.
Let the sky shove between me and myself,
Like it shoves between trees,
Breaking the tops of their trunks into branches.
I want to catch the fading light that stirs,
Bending shadows gradually,
As they trip over each other,
Untangling to make room.
I want to be untangled.
I want to take up more space,
And very much less.
Author Commentary: I am interested in the connection between nature and nurture as it regards the human attempt to inflict “nurture” onto the natural world. I hope to demonstrate how, often, the natural world ends up “nurturing” us. We often focus on our own effects, as I demonstrate in the first poem, “Dwelling.” However, through these poems, I investigate the notion that our attempts to shape nature end up with us being shaped by it. I explore how the natural world teaches us to be human as it teaches us about itself.Even when we wreak our human wishes upon it, as in the example of the damage done to the tree, the natural world is still able to turn those lessons back on us. Thus, I invert the question, “Can humans control nature?” I focus on how nature controls our relationships both to itself, and ourselves. Other themes that I explore are: motherhood and suffering, spatially conceptualized personal-image, and painful adaption.
Rose Johnson (’24) is a poet and phenomenology enthusiast from Denver, Colorado. She loves writing and reading poetry that deals with human self-perception. She is currently a student in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she is writing her thesis on the relationship between ontology and poetic world- building.