This past February, I committed to read more poetry about Black love. I wanted to return to a younger me who skimmed less and paused more. I felt an accumulating numbness in my shoulders and between my eyes from not processing, not inhaling. I had spent many a Black History Month fervently curating resources for others to see us; now it was time to feed myself.
Once I started paying attention, I quickly encountered an abundance of poems by Ross Gay, Eve L. Ewing, Gwendolyn Bennet, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, and Cameron Awkward-Rich, poets neither pleading nor explaining. Everywhere their poems testify to Black love as the miracle of survival, the generational ramifications of our choices, the audacity to choose oneself, and the preciousness of being able to publicly call someone your own. Aware the world cannot grant safety, Black love fashions its own shelter. As I read, I inhaled Safia Elhillo’s love for the languages we stitch together from our mother countries, and what is lost in translation. I adopted Mahogany L. Browne’s love for one’s resilient fire amidst high rent and oppressive fear determined to snuff out life. I joined Lucille Clifton in cutting bundles of greens in the kitchen and sensing love for “the bond of live things everywhere.”
Evie Shockley expressed it best when she wrote:
my love is black, the only way i know
to live :: now fierce and demanding, now free
and unpossessed :: so for my magnet, my
love becomes steel, then, for my butterfly,
will not a flower but a whole field be ::
my love and my blackness together go—
*
Sooner than I expected, I noticed the first hints of spring’s arrival. And I don’t know if it was because of this new city or my restlessness to be outside, but I resolved for the first time to witness every major bloom. I pursued side streets, searching for pink watercolor-tinged magnolia buds. I refreshed bloom tracker sites, our modern almanacs, learning the six different stages of cherry blossoms. First daffodils appeared, then tulips, and eventually cascading lavender wisteria and ferociously scarlet azaleas, a comforting natural sequence. Delight after mourning, life after death. And all in between, wildflowers (though I missed the bluebells). Bloom discovery shook me from my stupor and became the reason I invited friends over or chose the long way home.
But it did not occur to me until recently how fitting the practices of Black poetry and “flower viewing” were together for my interconnected sense of self and a grounded hope. Like the poet Hanif Abdurraqib, I laugh at those who ask, “How can Black people write about flowers at a time like this?” When in tune with both, I anticipate life that is tucked away, declared barren, but still abiding, yet to unfurl. I remember my own knowledge of flora carries on foraging traditions that sustained Black people in migrations and escapes. I believe in prophecies and refuse to let this brief season pass in a muddy blur.
I find something new to wait for, and as I peer both outside and within, I marvel—all this can blossom here?
Comfort Sampong’s heart is sparked by fried plantains, tropical foliage and the stories of women thriving and creating a way out of no way. She graduated in 2018 with majors in economics and international development. Now she lives in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where she works on English communications for the Association for a More Just Society, a Honduran non-profit fighting for justice and peace.
