Beautyberry (callicarpa americana)
How I come back to you, Florida girl,
reaching up now from my sandy yard
with your couplets and trios of green spades,
your splayed stems like the start of magic.
In fall, your limbs make a yellow-green sprawl,
each branch wearing garnets in duplicate.
They hang on until the Long Night’s Moon.
Then you turn naked and wan.
Bush and not bush, chlorophyll, oxygen,
suddenly you’re my very own blood,
child and not child, lolling in her swing,
her laugh flitting up like a goldfinch.
I don’t want to walk out of this wonderland—
someday I’ll have to.
I’ll join the long-gone bobwhites,
the cicadas in your shadow.
Florida girl, as your breath skims the world,
I’ll hover a while in the sandspur lawn,
retelling the ways I adore you:
the way no-see-ums love moss
and dark seeds adore the earth.
for Liliana
GIANNA RUSSO is the inaugural Wordsmith of The City of Tampa. Read more.
“Beautyberry” originally appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal