In her mostly white town, an hour from Rocky Mountain National Park, a black poet considers centuries of protests against racialized violence

While waiting for the George Floyd verdict to be delivered, poet Camille Dungy put pen to paper.  Ms. Dungy is a decorated poet and editor who writes about nature, family, and the common histories that people share.  She has said “Being black, being a woman, being a daughter, being a person who feels deeply connected to the greater-than-human world: all these states of being are part of who I am. If there has not been a place for all these parts of me thus far in American letters, it’s my job to create that space and to inhabit it with honesty, integrity, beauty, and joy.”  The lines she penned during Derek Chauvin’s trial were all those things. 

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In her mostly white town, an hour from Rocky Mountain National Park, a black poet considers centuries of protests against racialized violence

by Camille T. Dungy

Two miles into

the sky, the snow

builds a mountain

unto itself.

Some drifts can be

thirty feet high.  

Picture a house.

Then bury it.

Plows come from both 

ends of the road,

foot by foot, month

by month.  This year

they didn't meet 

in the middle

until mid-June.

Maybe I'm not

expressing this

well.  Every year,

snow erases 

the highest road.

We must start near

the bottom and 

plow toward each

other again.