THE BLACK GENE
Poetry comes in
with you,
with the streaks of your mother’s blood
and your hunger.
Poetry is the blackest, the most
restless of your genes:
it is your innate passion
for conflicting stories,
for devious music,
and questionable love affairs.
It is as intimate and undeniable
as the grain of your breathing,
as the rise and fall of your heart.
Farnham Blair
| This poem, “The Black Gene,” comes from THE MOVIE QUEEN and Other Poems, Puckerbrush Press, Orono, ME, 1996. Four other books of mine have been published, THE BLUE LINE: Essays on Landscape and Narrative; IMMANENT GREEN: Poems; ART NOTES: Essays and Observations; and PERIPHERAL VISIONS: Memoirs of a Washington Childhood. |