Quotes from Camille T. Dungy

A person who isn't reminded several times a day about the implications of the color of her skin has time to consider the implications of other things.

ASSOCIATION COPY (excerpt) Who can help the heart, which is grand and full of gestures? … The whole year I spent loving him, something splendid as lemons, sour and bright and leading my tongue toward new language, was on the book shelf… We make habits out of words. I grew accustomed to his, the way they spooned me into sleep so many times.

FLIGHT (excerpt) You slid into the summer of my sleeping, crept into my lonely hours, ate the music of my dreams. … It is the time of the waking cold, when buckeyes, Like a thousand thousand metronomes, take time, and you, fat on my summer sleep, twitter toward me, walk away. It is the time for the parting of our days.

Whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden. By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others. We should all take some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn't easy.

Here's a simple complication: What do I mean when I say the word nature? Even as I build it, my answer shifts. I picture the simultaneously increasing and decreasing heft at the tops of the sand dunes Edward Abbey describes in Desert Solitaire. The instability that is the only stable truth beyond the angle of repose.

Origin Story Outside my window is the beginning of half my poems. The others start outside my door. In cach case the window is my body. I am always on the other side of the door. All summer every place around me caught fire. The flames orange haze spilled into my blood.

We are all telling the same story. When writing about race, there can perhaps be precious little wholly fresh revelation. As with writing about motherhood. It has been the same story for as long as anyone can remember.