In her mostly white town, an hour from Rocky Mountain National Park, a black poet considers centuries of protests against racialized violence

Two miles into
the sky, the snow
builds a mountain
unto itself.

Some drifts can be
thirty feet high.
Picture a house.
Then bury it.

Plows come from both
ends of the road,
foot by foot, month
by month. This year

they didn’t meet
in the middle
until mid-June.
Maybe I’m not

expressing this
well. Every year,
snow erases
the highest road.

We must start near
the bottom and
plow toward each
other again.

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“I drafted this poem while teaching as a staff poet at the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop, where all poets are asked to write a poem a day. I often find that the exhaustion that comes from maintaining a daily writing practice opens me to surprising and rewarding avenues of inquiry. The 4x4 structure I imposed on these lines and stanzas helped me whittle this poem down to what felt like its most necessary components.”
—Camille T. Dungy