The Hills are Writing

^{Lynchburg, VA. Summer 2022}

They sing as they walk n’ when they walk they dance. The Blueblack women. 
They whisper bout me, up North, this green don’t exist. I don’t know 

who I was before I was a campus, maybe a forest, maybe another people’s
mother. They don’t care bout what was made of me. The Blueblack women

they grin, huff something bout the sun, the devil’s hot ass breath on their napes. 
Ask me who is you? I paint dusk the orange of their blueblack fingertips, 

that dye on their lips. That’s a pretty name ooo. I don’t see folks like them much.
When they walk about the daylight, curl up in my grass blades, groan

Damn! these hills is hilling today! It’s the sweetest curse of my name, women 
who come from flatlands, buildings that bleed no natural light. Blueblack

women greet me in the morning bluer than they were last night. They dress
in red, ripe plums. I watch them chase each other, blueblack between the pillars, 

no fear they’ll lose sight of the other. They near campfires n’ don’t burn. 
One bluer woman, smilin’ like a bunny-moon says I’ve never seen a mountain.

If I could, she’d wake up with me outside her window, glowing blue.
She’d scale my shoulder with her bare hands. I don’t know who 

I was before, maybe some ground, some unknown lists of murders.
But these blue, blue women are giggling in the green of me.

Copyright © 2024 by Isha Camara. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 1, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“This poem was written in the midst of my master’s program in Lynchburg, Virginia. I was in awe of the greenery, the mountains, the sunsets in comparison to Minnesota—flat, and its beauty is its water. I mourned that this land was forced to hold a cruel name. The Virginian landscape was unfamiliar to me, so the poem speaks from the perspective of nature. I imagine the hills, their collective voice. I hoped the mountains could taste my wonder. I felt them watching me, the Black women I wrote and sunbathed with, all of us witnessing each other with reverence.”
—Isha Camara