Sojourner

For the tread,
I am a farmer woman
From another field—
Hymn rise, fervid tend

For each tree. Bone
Crossing. Each.
Meal astride death

I made way
In the way light raptures
Through logs of sound. 

There, I trembled to knowledge.
And the bees glittered for me also.
I wanted a blue dress.

In the night, flies
In the lace of the trees—
A city

Where my breast culled clouds.
I peered into land
Through hollow
The wind against me.

Copyright © 2024 by Marie-Ovide Dorcely. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 4, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“The sojourner frequently appears as a motif of journey in my poems. Both as Sojourner and sojourner. The journey presented is unremitting, replete with beauty, astonishment, agony, torment. It establishes the life course of people of African descent in the Americas, motivated by action and deepest reflection. Here, the journeyer Sojourner Truth speaks with an eternal voice and a panoptic sense through an aspect of self to elucidate her sojourning: an invitation to know her newly, what she notes and notices, in rigor and lightness. The ordinary and visionary luminosity of this self-owned woman-being becomes revelation, surprising narrated expectations. This poem is part of a long series about primordial women.”
—Marie-Ovide Dorcely