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Bloom: Bahia, Brazil

Welcome to the first day of National Poetry Month, 2024! April Fool’s Day too, but I admit I don’t have any good poetic jokes to share. Like all interesting remarks or retorts, the right–or most interesting, or funniest–thing to say often comes later than the best moment to say it.

Without ado, then, a poem that hasn’t appeared anywhere else (yet) but was written some time ago, after a trip to a coffee growing region in Brazil.

Bloom: Bahia, Brazil

Only once did I wear rubber snake boots,
and isn’t that the way we’ve evolved?
So many trips, lolling in the cargo space
of our green station wagon, or the blue.

Belting in just to nap stretched
on the middle bench. We don’t know
what’s before, or after. I am but a booted foot
tramping a poor trail, leaving more trace

than I meant, stomping to scare snakes off.
More afraid of me than I of them?
I think not. More likely they mark my shadow
in sunny silence, all eyelids open—

lethargy thy name is Snake. Called to venom,
but not its passing. Standing here,
so far from hospital, under clear
unending blue, in clay-mudded boots.

The smell faintly jasmine: coffee buds about to bloom.


And yes, the aroma of coffee in bloom does remind one of jasmine. They are related plants.

Published inMy PoemsNatl Poetry Month 2024