Vignettes in Spring by Lisa Sammoh

Vignettes in Spring

Return to the field your forefathers leased.

Small body, what a beautiful life lived.

Our ground, still browning, cradles hands and

feet of our mothers and once daughters too.

Beneath cooling green waters and yellow

heat, their hues gleam.

You urge me:

Speak of three.

Grape skin, translucent—slow to spoil,

like wine tenderly brewing.

Or pineapples, defiant,

their sweetness nibbling tongue.

The nature of eating is destruction.

And rotted fruit waits for nobody.

They slip over sea moss glass

tempered to a flat white desert.

There mountains wane and

creeks run the elbow of a busy highway—

In the February sun,

Your green body yellows.

Lisa Sammoh is an African diaspora poet currently writing from Vancouver, Canada. Her works have appeared in Sublunary Review, Olúmọ Review (selected for the 2024 Best of the Net Nomination), the Shallow Tales Review, the Kalahari Review, and elsewhere. They touch on the intersectional nuances from back home.