Drum Festival/Scent of Wood and Water

by SHAUNA M. MORGAN

in Spring 2018

Claes Gabriel, Woman With Turban, 2016

Drum Festival

It made sense
that we would find ourselves
alone on the bank,

although we must have forgotten
there was a river, though
that day she swelled,
covering the rocks that glimmered
and flashed up to my window.

That day she muddied the waters,
raged under the bridge,
uprooting careless saplings
that had begun to make a bed
near the shore,
chasing away the purple martins,
sending them launching
then diving quick and sharp.

We did not see or remember,
but her sound and rhythm
and urgency
must have moved our own.

Each roar and crash,
every pulse and drumbeat
coming
in low pitches,
reverberating still.

---

Scent of Wood and Water

Before breeding slaves
became more profitable
than buying them,
she walked, feet bare and dusty,
after dark
through wood sorrel
and wild sarsaparilla,
her legs and knees sweetened
by the berries.

She tore off wintergreen leaves,
crushed them in her fingers
until she reached him,
all scent and water.

And he, salt-skinned,
a journey on his back,
valleys and rivers
and ridges, reached for her
in the dark
knowing just where to find her
waist, how to free her breasts,
how to love,
all scent and wood and man,
until she whimpered,
rested on his shoulder
and greeted him
with her tongue
and slept, at last.

---

The author of Fear of Dogs & Other Animals, Shauna M. Morgan is a poet and scholar who springs from a rural district in Clarendon, Jamaica and holds an enduring love for the Diaspora about which she writes. She teaches creative writing and literature of the African Diaspora at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and her current research focuses on representations of womanhood and Neo-anticolonialism in 21st-century literature. Her poems were shortlisted for the 2011 Small Axe literary prize, and recently won honorable mention for the 2016 Salem College International Literary Awards Rita Dove Prize.  They have appeared in ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness, Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Anthology of Appalachian Writers Volume VI, Interviewing the Caribbean, and elsewhere.  Her critical work has appeared in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and South Atlantic Review.