Today, I force myself out of school on a free period, and walk into Central Park.
There’s a neon sign, [Protect your security] and I shake my head. It is the day
After Election Day, I am sick with worry, and fear. Again, the eye of the tyrant
calls, even here, in this light, this calm. My security? I think.
I think about questions: who carries this on after us? What if there is no one?
I don’t know, but I know November is a time of remembering. That feels right.
I know the world is made up of stories, of poems, and I see a tweet: What
Would happen if we stopped writing? I don’t know. I’d like to say chaos
Mischief, or despair, but honestly probably none of that would happen. There
Are ways to do everything. They would be written in our heads and hearts. Then,
Last month, in a hike around Cranberry Lake, before the terror took hold again,
In a moment of pure forest bathing, I looked at the colored leaves on the path—
That is poetry, the dried-up old pond, its pockets and cracks— that is poetry;
I turned my eyes up to the near-white of the sky, then down, to the crunch of our
Steps — that is poetry. And then, just as we were about to turn away, and walk
Back to the trailhead, suddenly out came the Great Blue Heron. Its wingspan
Wide as a tapestry. The sound of him, like the whipping of wind. It was both
Wonderful, and full of wonder, and there he was, suddenly out from under the
Eye, and the mud and the desolate gray of the day, out, out, out, over and across
The pond, a vertical line, a mirror to the sky, we gasped there— that is poetry.
That camouflage, that song, that notion of what is there, what is not there,
And what is there that you don’t always see: living, breathing, thriving.
—
Leah Umansky is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Of Tyrant (Word Works Books, 2024). She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The Couplet Reading Series in NYC since 2011. She is the creator of the Stay Brave Substack which encourages women-identifying creatives to inspire other women-identifying creatives to stay brave in their creative pursuits. Her creative work has been featured on PBS, and in such places as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, Poetry, Bennington Review, and American Poetry Review. She is an educator and writing coach who has taught workshops to all ages at such places as Poetry School London, Poets House, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and elsewhere. She is working on a fourth collection of poems Ordinary Splendor, on wonder, joy and love. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com
