Photographs of an Imagined Childhood

I saw a brace of mountain like

spotted, black & white horses

clopping down the dusty road

through clouds of powdered clay

The abandoned train tracks cleaved into woods

What loneliness tilled from my mind

fallen pine needles etched on the tracks

I watched them gleam—bright countries I’d never visit

Even my imagination excavates silence

Even my imagination is lonely

& then a reprieve, it was summer

The smell of clay & the bees I killed with my hands

Shamar Hill, who is Jewish, Barbadian and Cherokee, graduated from the MFA program at New York University. He is the recipient of numerous awards including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He has been published in the American Reader and has work forthcoming in Rumpus and Southern Humanities Review. He is working on his first poetry collection, Photographs of an Imagined Childhood, and a memoir, In Defiance of All True Things.