Wild Sweet Pea — Blackbird Archive

← v21n3, Spring 2023

In the margin between the hard surface and the grasses,

a tangle of small pink wings: sweet peas.

I read that the brain naturally gravitates toward negative

thoughts. A negativity bias. A wariness, a worry

for survival. Nevertheless, extravagant shades of pink.

Nevertheless, the billows of August, pointlessly excellent,

textured, wings (open hands), afloat on a sea of green

on this day in which the eye is sick from colluding with

the mind. In which there is this clarity, this brilliance,

and a gust of birds. We are all in the same place!

We (the whole of everything) are like lovers

who must ignore each other a while. In order to turn

to risk each other again. The small blossoming fear

that comes with knowing this will end.

nature love mortality

Fleda Brown

Fleda Brown is the author of the poetry collection The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems (2017), which was chosen for the University of Nebraska poetry series 2017, and a memoir, Driving With Dvorak (2010), both of which were published by the University of Nebraska Press. She has nine previous collections of poems. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award. Brown has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series and was Poet Laureate of Delaware from 2001–2007. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware and on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop.