Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves
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About this ebook
From J. Drew Lanham, MacArthur "Genius" Grant Recipient and author of Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, comes a sensuous new collection in his signature mix of poetry and prose.
In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being. Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament. Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division. In Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Lanham mines the deep connection to ancestors through the living world and tunes his unique voice toward embracing the radical act of joy.
J. Drew Lanham
J. Drew Lanham is the author of Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts and The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature. He has received a MacArthur "Genius" Grant as well as the Dan W. Lufkin Conservation Award (National Audubon Society), the Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs Outstanding Service Award (North American Association for Environmental Education), and the E. O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation (Center for Biological Diversity). He served as the Poet Laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina in 2022. He is a bird watcher, poet, and Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University. He lives in Seneca, South Carolina.
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The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mossback: Ecology, Emancipation, and Foraging for Hope in Painful Places Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
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Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves - J. Drew Lanham
TO NOTICE
Don’t be surprised that I have suddenly taken to the woods. I hate routine.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
At Altitude
From up here
I sometimes look down
on this land we sometimes call home
collectively (sometimes),
that some called home long ago,
but now
I cannot see the color of a single human soul.
It is impossible to know who loves whom,
whether bread is being broken at tables,
what stress or strife fractures home and hearth
what binds in kindness or care,
whether life lingers sweet, or death drops bitter quick—
I cannot know any of this from up here.
Only how shades of brown, tinges of gray,
stretches of green fingering
wet crotches where water might be,
pull me into it
so deep I can hardly breathe.
For brief moments at velocity, chasing speed of sound,
all stands still for a second or two
in the frame of plexiglass to which I am assigned:
seat 8A, Business Class.
I cannot see any manner of Homo sapiens identity
or presence ever wrought, for an instant
everything is nothing and it is all overwhelming
wild vastness I desire to swallow me,
whole soul—
devour my nothing into its nothingness.
I see from nearly forty thousand feet high what
earth pushed up
has been worn down by sun wind snow ice fire and rain,
rendered as art in relief.
All of it is time. Time.
Time ticking by in grains of soil once solid stone
where none could witness until time made it clear what was.
Time now wearing apart in what no one could ever count
underneath clouds no one could ever possess.
It is in these moments flying higher than any hawk might imagine,
an obsession of mountains, prairie, splines of rivers.
Basins flattened fanned out,
backbones of ridges flanked by bared ribs of rock
left behind from countless ages of time and physics
having their way with one another.
Time tumbles the physics rough.
Both consent.
And then the moment passes.
Center pivot circles appear as targets for desire.
We want what we want.
Have to make
wild nothing into our something.
Progress, some might say.
Humanity marks the vast with fence lines,
sections that can be owned or commanded
by tractor, plow, center pivot, or black angus.
The geometry fucks geology.
Did not ask for what it took by force.
There is discord everywhere.
Politics rapes peace.
I cannot see the hate at altitude,
but feel it inside.
I remember.
Glass and steel catches light to glint it back as reminder.
I remember.
Here I am up here sucking gas, carbonizing.
Making my own outsized tracks.
There we are down there sod busting, planting,
paving, grazing, drilling, draining.
Being us undeniably together in the whole mess.
I find comfort more in past tense of what I saw
three hundred miles back before
my past-tense brain caught up
with my now heart.
Wheels down and more school children are dead.
Denial was for a while
a wild place on the map
down there.
Big Easy Black Bird
There are stories
the string of beads would tell,
hanging now as they do
from the sweep of live oak branch,
festooned like so much glamped-up Spanish moss.
What manner of drunken debauch warranted arboreal launch?
What was bared? What stayed hidden?
Who sinned? Was everyone the next day forgiven?
Does God, on that day, sneak a sip?
Would Jesus throw baubles at Mary Magdalene?
Ask her for a glimpse?
A crow strolls