in dawn skim – the day world wrestling

with the dark – what I want is an old life/ the cook’s seat

at the banquet before my guests’ arrival         last night’s spectacle
to change my mind – I want virgin suburban sidewalks poured
over chernozem/ the slab disappeared                       the blanched

dim of progress suddenly gone missing         I want something simple

humus: fat & rolling in it    what I want in color & sound

is the crash & thud the relentless clash of green & green & green

some more (out here where there’s nothing else)

what I crave is the crotch

of dusk in river odor incense/ tinctures of silt & ooze pushing up

from the first flood plain to the second (hours

after the inundation) as terra rosa ferric strata      & what I see

as one more backward glance is red earth come worldly

as sandcrete blocks: slurry poured in colonial molds: two thousand

bricks to the day & the kiln kept firing in six full revolutions

of earth’s determined turning             of scratch to creation – there is

no practical reason nor logic for making movement/ no job nor purpose

for our accounting – just one more truth from a tale of fallen love

unexpected as is so often the case

the head over heels come as a shock & still through the pitch

& heave of little sleep (rest          rest      is almost as unyielding)

all I want is the mothering of soothers & smoothers         & forgiving

to keep my old fires burning (as the balefire

drafts upwards) sparking the big wheel          in the night’s sky

Mara Adamitz Scrupe is an artist, poet, and filmmaker. Her visual work has been featured in exhibitions and permanent installations worldwide, and she has received divers creative grants, fellowships and residencies. She has won or been shortlisted for international writing awards, and she has published seven award winning poetry collections; an eighth is forthcoming in 2027. Her poems often reflect on place-ness, evoking palpable experiences of land, people, plants and animals in extended rumination on migration and mobility, displacement and dynamism, voyaging and settling in. https://scrupe.com