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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2011 : Adrie Kusserow
THE COUNTRY OF YOUR GARDEN
for Robert
Despite everything,
there you are again,
deep in the humid thighs of July,
propagating Eden, little by little
as you walk, regal and measured,
lip curled, hands clasped behind your back,
through the hay strewn paths between raised beds,
the blazing democracy of your garden flourishing beyond
all expectation, wild flags crawling up its borders,
butterflies, deer, children, dogs, crows,
all clamor to be inside its gates, with you,
your fingers combing threads of cosmos,
scabiosa, marigold, hosta
rubbing the furry brown abdomens of Echinacea,
soft and eerie as fontanelle.
Huge mopped puppets of sunflowers
bob in the wind
as you mercilessly tear the juicy weeds
from what they know is good and sweet
smoothing the soil back again,
as if you are putting a child
back to sleep in a hurry.
I'm waving from the window,
but you can't see me. There's still time
for me to cross the border,
slip under the fence
and lie beneath you
flooded with your rough, blond soiled hands.
Come, after all these years, prune me.
I promise I could still rise up to you
like the sunflower, wild haired, glad and naïve
but hurry, you know our children won't sleep
for much longer, gummy lips pouting as they follow
the rugged terrain of a scary dream's plot,
and before the morning steam burns off
in another humid, hilly country
too close to Sudan
swaddled in green jungle,
another war is brewing,
for now, the machetes silently glistening
like stones in the river,
the toddlers waddling with their pumpkin bellies,
the farmers, methodically
turning their dried beds of resentment
over and over. This country you have tried so earnestly to understand,
soon to be dug up again with the claws of war,
the wild blood beds of the harvest,
the fetid human compost strewn everywhere.
Hurry.
This poem was a finalist in the 2011 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Adrie Kusserow
Adrie Kusserow lives in Underhill Center, Vermont with her husband and two children. She is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at St. Michael's College in Colchester, VT where she teaches courses on Refugees, Poverty, and Culture, Illness and Healing. She and her husband and some of the Lost Boys of Sudan that resettled in Burlington, Vermont helped start Africa ELI (Education and Leadership Initiative) which focuses on building gender equality through girls education in South Sudan. She has taken students on service learning trips to Uganda, Sudan and Bhutan. She received degrees in Comparative Religion (M.A.) and Social Anthropology (Ph.D.) from Harvard University and studied
poetry at the Bread Loaf School of English in Ripton, Vermont.
Adrie Kusserow is also a poet. Her first book of poems (Hunting Down the Monk) was published by BOA Editions, Ltd. as part of their New American Poets Series and her second book (Beneath the Sky, the Longing) which features many poems about Sudan and Uganda, is also forthcoming with BOA. Adrie Kusserow has been published in The Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Sun, Salmagundi, Harvard Review and Anthropology and Humanism. She has won numerous poetry awards from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and is a teacher and reader of
ethnographic poetry and literature.
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