Forgiveness: The Black Walnut

Go ahead. Bitch up a storm if you want. Call those hard husks 

cracking down what you will—crocodile projectiles, apples of Gomorrah, 

green meteorites, crow brimstone—but know you don’t mean what you say,

you’ll never cut down that fierce grandmother of a tree, no matter 

how her fruits of doom might pock your car and startle you 

with an October’s worth of shingle-denting, rifle-shot cracks, 

no matter how they Rorschach your sidewalk with a test that can’t be 

scrubbed away, each rain-leached stain the blackened calligraphy 

of electrical burns and gunpowder blasts that read you can’t hold back

nature, no matter how trim your lawn. Because you also know damn well

how she mannas the ground each fall, know how pleased the ever-growing teeth 

of the squirrels, how few would hardly survive winter, not without this gift 

heaven-sent, just in time, right when the crickets begin to cricket slowlike, ambering 

the autumn mornings with their long farewell, when the katydids you waited to hear all June

finally close their saw-tooth wings and drift down with the season’s dead

leaves. There is forgiveness, then, for this insistent mess 

necessary for life, forgiveness for the hazard it creates right outside your door, 

all those edible cannonballs causing more than one ass-busting fall. 

When I finally placed a sweetly tannic bit of what that beast of tree had to give 

under my own tongue, I began to understand: I began to forgive 

you, began to forgive myself: We didn’t mean it; we too were just trying 

to survive. I swallowed it down, and the tree, with no sense of forgiveness nor a reason 

to be forgiven, flashed her compound leaves gold, dug her roots deeper to insist 

her way into the cracks in our foundation, to hang on even tighter.

Nickole Brown is the author of Sister: A Novel-in-Poems and Fanny Say: A Biography-in-Poems. Read more.


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