First Salvos, Savannah

Maya C. Popa

Mercy should not be counted on, you think,

weaving between senatorial oaks

and the drawn faces of the rebel statues.

The city’s gentility puts you on edge,

or shame does, that you should travel south

to lands decided by your forbearers.

All for the draw of ancient trees,

their buried ties most deeply speaking

to what’s swiftly falling all around us—

what the center, if there was one,

has no dream of holding. But cast

your attention to the branches now

and witness spring’s mauve detonation.

A pelican followed the boat at dusk,

white as a shroud, and close enough to touch.

MAYA C. POPA is the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton/Picador) named one of the Guardian’s best recent books of poetry, and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and winner of the North American Book Prize. Her poems and essays appear in The Atlantic, the Nation, Poetry, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, and was previously a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford University, where she received her MA. The Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly, she teaches advanced poetry at NYU and runs Conscious Writers Collective, an online writing community for rigorous and supportive writing mentorship for those seeking guidance beyond the scope of traditional degrees.