Caulbearer
Yucca brevifolia
Pheasant and nuthatch, five-petaled flower,
emerald feather suspended in veils—
we don’t know how long the world can hold
such specimens of tenderness, how far
the glacial drifts can ferry such tombs,
immaculate, before they themselves turn
into ghosts—Everything writhes before the dream
discards what it calculates for reduction:
and yet the yucca moth delivers its eggs
inside the flower, even as leaves sharpen
their bayonet-points. At dusk, we scan the horizon
for anchors and tents; we lean into the wind
hungry for the brass tinkle of hawk bells
and the trance-like drone of hegelung.
If we split these reeds down their length,
how many of us can ride out the coming flood
before sunlight returns or we’ve softened into moss?
Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Caulbearer (Immigrant Writing Series Prize, Black Lawrence Press; 2024), Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020),The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), 12 other books, and 4 chapbooks. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize, UK—the world’s first major award for ecopoetry (now known as the Ginkgo Prize), selected by a panel headed by former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. She is lead editor, along with co-editors Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman, of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States(Paloma Press, September 2023). Luisa is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University. She also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. During her appointed term as 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded her one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, to support a program of public poetry projects.