A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Two Poems by Brittney Corrigan

Brittney Corrigan, Oregon, USA

 

Anthropocene Blessing: Baobab

 

You of the wide, cylindrical trunk,

too large for any embrace, your

tufts of towering branches threaded

with nests. You of watermelon-scented 

flowers, snouted by fork-marked lemurs

through the star-curtained night.

You whose seed-dispersers are already

ghosts, elephant birds lost to the dust

centuries ago, leaving you yearning

many centuries hence. May thirst

never topple you. May lightning

never split your fibrous core. May

your crown reach palmate leaves

into the vast blue heat. Tree of Life,

may you bear fruit despite how

we have failed you. Your taproots

reaching for water beneath our feet,

we with your citrus-bright gifts 

upon our lips, may you outlast us. 

May you who are sacred and innocent

shed us like dry leaves and remain.

Anthropocene Blessing: California Condor

 

King of birds, you of the nine-foot wingspan,

you who glide for hours on currents of air 

without a single beat, thousands of feet above 

the leaden earth. Scavenger ancestor, only 

surviving member of your genus, longest-lived.

May you feast on the flesh of the dead 

as you toss their spirits up to the sky. May 

the carrion ghosts look down upon your

unplumaged head, your black-feathered, 

sacred form, and be healed of all that stalked

them in this world. May you be not poisoned 

by our buckshot, seething in each carcass 

we leave behind. May you outgrow our

captivity to hatch your single eggs in mountain 

cliff caves, giant redwood trees. New World 

vulture, may your bulbous, wrinkled visage 

remember how you soared over mammoths. 

May you be revered as virtuous, as rising back 

from the brink, as gathering your flock around 

the fallen. May you take death in your mouth

and find it sweet, find that it sustains.

 

 

Brittney Corrigan was raised in Colorado but has called Portland, Oregon her home since 1990. She holds a degree from Reed College, where she is also employed. Corrigan’s poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of the collection Navigation (The Habit of Rainy Nights Press) and the chapbook 40 Weeks (Finishing Line Press). Her newest collection, Daughters, a series of persona poems in the voices of daughters of various characters from folklore, mythology, and popular culture, is forthcoming from Airlie Press in 2021. 

For more information, visit Brittney’s website: http://brittneycorrigan.com/.

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