Crow
—to the young worrier that lives in me
Dearness—My hand won’t stop brushing the rough
bark of the redbud you didn’t believe
we’d live to see flower again. And I can smell
the windfallen leaves involved in the dark work
we still have left before we embrace
in the one night all bodies must lie down in.
But not today. Today the neighborhood crows
and traveling geese are singing of arrival: We made it!
We made it!—thin light slanting gently through
this busy air. Thank you for filling up
our lungs between each suffering back then,
for giving us what we needed to get
here, where I pick one of this season’s last
edible seeds just to feel your smile’s old
rarity stumble across the quiet
warmth of my mouth’s stage. Often, we were racked
with unthinkable grief; and more sorrow
is surely on its way. But we were blessed
by something, too. And today the soft light,
the coarse tree with its crisp pods, the singing
wind, and this absurd swell of gratitude
for how you outlived the awful wait
that fear can make of longing—which, I’ve come
to assure you, we find bright ways to survive.
Geffrey Davis is the author of One Wild Word Away (BOA Editions, 2024), Night Angler (BOA Editions, 2019), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won an A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
Named a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in poetry, Davis has received an Anne Halley Poetry Prize, a Dogwood First Prize in Poetry, a Wabash Prize for Poetry, a Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Penn State Humanities Institute.
A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis currently lives with his family in the Ozarks. He teaches with the Program in Creative Writing & Translation at the University of Arkansas and with the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran’s low-residency MFA program. Davis also serves as poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.