What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Ecopoetry Now, invited poets highlight poetry’s integral role in sustaining our ecological imagination. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Ariana Benson
 

“It was the dense, tangled hostility of the [Great Dismal] swamp and its enormous size that enabled hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of escaped slaves to live here in freedom.” 
—Smithsonian Magazine, 2016 

“Here, among snakes, bears and panthers... I felt to myself so light, that I almost thought I could fly... I then thought I would not have left the place to go to heaven.” 
—Captain Moses Grandy, 1843 
I send men swarms of insects in the shape of your ghost. 
They are not wrong to think me haunted, possessed as I am 
by spirits exhumed from bodies left strewn in my wake. I trick 
them into thinking me God, but to them I am Eden, wicked 

paradise of poison, fruit and beasts. I steep sweat from acrid 
flesh, sip it in pinpricks with the tongues of jewel-toned bees. 
I spill their blood in your name. When it seeps into my murk, I turn 
a rich maroon hue, and I remember you fondly, longing 

for nights when there was nothing but you and me, twilight’s ichor 
and wind quivering in my reeds—a southern serenade. I hope 
you knew I heard the song of your silence, your heartbeat 
camouflaged in the thrumming pulse of mine. Now, they smelt 

molten asphalt into my arteries, litter the air with my ashes. I watch 
myself burn and search for your face in the flames. I knew you 
then as amalgam of marsh and man, sometimes just tar-black 
beads sunk into star-white glow—your eyes glinting in the glass 

of my stillness. Under the cover of dusk you snuck nips of raw 
honeysuckle, lugged saw-shorn Juniper trunks through my mud. 
Like your namesake, you made many waters from my one, 
and like the Red Sea, I opened—bared my soul to your people, 

and closed to your tormentors. I cherish the sacred pleasure 
of being parted by your hands. I ache for the long-ago days 
when your vessel’s crest gently unzipped my quiet mire
like the waning sun ripples liquid along the horizon’s serrated blade. 

You told me then that you would not have left me for Heaven itself, 
so I drag them through the Hell they wanted me to be for you. 
from the book BLACK PASTORAL / University of Georgia Press
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Cover image of Ariana Benson's 2023 book, Black Pastoral
What Sparks Poetry:
Ariana Benson on "Dear Moses Grandy, ...Love, The Great Dismal Swamp"

The first time the land spoke to me through poetry, its message arrived in the form of a letter, not addressed to me, but from one lover to another. In “Dear Moses Grandy, …Love, the Great Dismal Swamp,” the murky, forested, ever-shrinking land of Southeastern Virginia (that was the backdrop of much of my childhood) writes to and commemorates her first lover: Moses Grandy, an enslaved man, who, in his single-person boat and with his rustic, handmade tools, carved canals out of the murk and morass that had scared many intrepid explorers away for good.
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Cover of Joyelle McSweeney's book, Death Styles
"A Review of Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles"

"Grief is the ultimate organizing principle here. Grief will have the final word. On the page, one might mistake the lines for gentler than they are, but read aloud, McSweeney’s poetics and aesthetics turn toward terrifying tongue twisters.thrumming with a rhythm that never quite settles down. Instead, her syntax pushes to the edge of meaning and beyond, off the cliff of it altogether, into a phantasmagoria of sound."

viaTHE RUMPUS
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