Ariana Benson
An Ecopoet Talks about Land and Black Love in the South
In our brief conversation this past summer, Ariana discussed the impetus for her new collection of poems, Black Pastoral—a paean to her roots in the American South and to the complex histories and intimate relationships of Black Southerners with nature and each other in that homeplace. The poems also consider our urgent ecological crisis and the prospects for Black life and love in the future. —Sharan Strange (This interview has been edited.)
Aubade After Earth
we wake only to growing
bristles of heat. more undark
-ness than ante-light. no chirping
trills to jumble the senses,
to arrythmia night’s violet
hum. no cygnets to rain
trumpet sobs on tattered
rooftops. no rain. no roofs.
I miss the birds.
but it’s truer that you ache
for their song. the score that lured
seeds of luster into bloom.
we haven’t been gone long
enough to miss a thing more
than what it made for us. here,
we radiate a platinum sheen
—yet, in the smallest of mercies,
we know ourselves, still,
as Black. I fled
just before the brimstone,
left the world to salt
herself over.
I wonder what still lives
among the grains.
I would ask in earnest, but even if I had
a spare dove, how cruel
to send it searching for a lone
green star in the sparse constellation
of what once was forest.
of what was, once.
that last night under the trees, you
plucked a leaf from my hair,
pressed it against my cheek.
I threaded pine straw
through the back and forth of its
ribboned blade, the damp spire dyed
my fingertips the bronze
of fresh regret.
sometimes I sleep
with it behind my ear, the swell
of your pulse still breaking
perfect as its sinus wave.
a few crooked notes—that’s all I had
to offer in return. all I have sung since.
it’s just as well that I leave
my voice to make shelter
of your mind—somewhere
it might survive.
what has apocalypse taught us
but how to love
unwholly?
Where do you go in the morning?
you feel me lying
here, folded into the back
and forth of you, but know I’m lost
in those woods. you dread
the hour when my eyes glacier,
just before the demiblue thaws
their whites. how long can we pretend
this turn toward Earth’s still
-lit wick brings the same warmth
as dawn, that fuming glow
could ever kiss with the soft lips
of sunning sky?
what new life can there be
without forgetting
those given over
to flame?
I sigh,
Nowhere…
and crumble the quiet,
confirm you have not dreamt
my breath’s susurrus on the plain
of your nape: a wind that passes
for honesty. for what
I still know of it.
Ariana Benson, "Aubade After Earth," Indiana Review, Issue 44, vol. 1 (Summer 2022). Copyright © 2022 Ariana Benson. Republished with the permission of the author. All rights reserved.
Ariana Benson is a southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the 2022 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, the Porter House Review Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Graybeal Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.