Tuesday, June 28, 2016

DC Poet: Sarah Browning

Names she tried to teach me


Sibilant forsythia, hard-ringed dogwood,
     and this vine: red bead bursting from
yellow sheathing; autumn’s surprise
     she gathered to grace the mantelpiece,
to twine our hearts to hers. I’ve lost
     the name: Bright morning? Mustard
joy? Harvest noon? Burnt breakfast?
     Wandering winter jewel?
Spotting the red and yellow
     caught in November’s edge-of-field
bramble catches me. I could not love
     her enough. Tangle of guilt, bramble
of no name. It comes a few days later:
     bittersweet.



  Sarah Browning is co-founder and Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poetry of Provocation & Witness and an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. Author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden and co-editor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology, she is the recipient of artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, a Creative Communities Initiative grant, and the People Before Profits Poetry Prize. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and POETRY magazine.

1 comment:

  1. This is wonderful--funny, sad, true, and made of words.

    ReplyDelete