Pine-needled and twigged
I wear wind’s patchwork.
Weave Orion’s Belt into my cross-hatched
heronry so egg can clutch leaf scrim.
I’m the well-made platform.
A manifesto above marsh, among frozen streams
sometimes where grey wing
meets salt as sea-seam blooms foam.
I watch, stalk.
Scaffold the moon, scrounge lichen.
Panopticon
the sky. Look. I rook pond and vernal pool.
I’m empire’s swampy mother.
Still I harbor blue.
With lightning speed I anthropocene.
I sort. Look. While I stitch grass to my breast.
My wilderness haunts the shoreline.
I am shy. Think structure or witch.
You dilly dally. My fire consuming your lungs.
About the brokenness
of the world I build I architect
but what do I know.
Pamela Hart is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art where she teaches and manages a visual literacy arts in education program. Her book, Mothers Over Nangarhar, was published in 2019 by Sarabande Books after winning the Kathryn A. Morton prize. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in poetry in 2013. In addition, she’s an editor for Afghan Voices, the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and As You Were: The Military Review. Her poems have been published in various online and print journals.