On nature by Quraysh Ali Lansana
By Benjamin Myers
Hello, I’m poet and professor Benjamin Myers here for Poetry on the Plains. Today I’m sharing with you a poem by quintessential Oklahoman poet Quraysh Ali Lansana.
Lansana is the author of over twenty books of poetry, nonfiction, and children’s literature. He is Applied Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing and Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he is also Director of the African American Studies program and the Media Lab. Among his many other accomplishments and professional roles, Lansana has served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University. He is also Executive Producer of the award-winning public radio program Focus: Black Oklahoma.
Loss, grief, the attempt to heal: these are universal human experiences. We don’t experience these things, however, just “in the universe.” We die and we grieve in specific places on the earth. Human loss is particular. It is embodied and emplaced. We inhabit our grief.
In “nature,” Quraysh Ali Lansana writes powerfully of loss and grief by giving it an address: the Wichita Mountains, near Medicine Park, Oklahoma. These mountains are beautiful, but they are stark. Hiking in the Wichitas, you come upon vistas that are both breathtaking and foreboding. In much of the year, it is a dry landscape, dominated by rock and yellow grass. This beauty and this starkness make the Wichita Mountains a fitting setting for reflecting on loss.
Here's the poem:
nature
wichita mountains, medicine park, ok
we hiked over an hour
cockleburs question our ankles
sweat bleeds dry sun
tears our somber ascent
summit elbows cloud
gorge a wide red grin
river drools miles below
tod unwrapped the plastic
around youkissed god
gave half of you back
then handed me the urn
i guided you to sky
you refused to leave
grit of you in my mouth
Used with Permission
One thing I love about this poem is that, like the landscape in which it is set, it manages to be dramatic and understated at the same time. The lack of capital letters, along with the short lines and lots of empty space, make the poem seem quiet, helping us to imagine the two grieving figures dwarfed in the vast natural space it took them an hour to hike into. This is not a gentle quiet; there is a harshness in the imagery. The hikers’ ankles are bothered by burs, and the summit “elbows” the clouds. The roughness of the landscape emphasizes a rawness in the grief. This is bare-boned elegy.
In the second half of the poem, we turn to an even more intimate picture of grief. It is likely that you, like me, do not know who Tod is. Clearly, however, he is someone close to the speaker and to the addressee of the poem. That we get no explanation other than his name adds to the sense of intimacy in the moment, as does the way the poem’s subject is simply addressed as “you.” There is a closeness that needs no explanation. If we, the readers, are observing this ritual, it no longer feels as if we are observing it from the outside and afar. The poet’s grief has become ours.
If you’ve known loss and grief, you know that you continue in many ways to feel the presence of the person who has become so painfully absent. Lansana captures this lingering in loss beautifully in the poem’s final image. Because they are loved, our dead really do, in a sense, refuse to leave. Or, at least, we refuse to let them leave. In the poem, the speaker’s loved one lingers as a “grit” in his mouth, the literal ashes but also the strong aftertaste of loss.
To love is always to risk loss, to inevitably at some point wind up on the bare mountainside of grief with a taste of ash in our mouths. It is a rare poet who can not only convey the pain in that loss but also the subtle sense that it was definitely worth it even if grief is the price of love.
For Poets on the Plains, I’m Benjamin Myers, writing, living, and sometimes grieving in Chandler, Oklahoma.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Benjamin Myers is the Crouch-Matthis Professor of Literature and the director of the Great Books Honors Program at Oklahoma Baptist University. A former poet laureate of Oklahoma, he is the author of four books of poetry. His work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Image, The Yale Review, 32 Poems, Rattle, and The South Carolina Review, and his sonnet sequence, Black Sunday, was praised by The Wallstreet Journal as one of the “five best books on the dust bowl.” He is a contributing editor for Front Porch Republic and lives in Chandler, OK. His most recent book of poems is The Family Book of Martyrs (2023), and his second book of nonfiction, Ambiguity and Belonging, was recently published by Belle Point Press.
Benjaminmyerspoetry.com
OKLAHOMA – FEATURED POET
Quraysh Ali Lansana, born in Enid, Oklahoma, earned his MFA from New York University, where he was a Departmental Fellow. He is author of over twenty books in poetry, nonfiction and children’s literature. Lansana is Applied Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing and Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he is also Director of the African American Studies program and the Media Lab. Lansana is an alumnus of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and was formerly a Lecturer in Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University-Tulsa where he also served as Director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation.
Lansana is Executive Producer of KOSU/NPR’s Focus: Black Oklahoma monthly radio program, which is a recipient of a 2022 duPont-Columbia Award, a 2022 NAACP Image Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists Award and was a Peabody Award nominee. Lansana is also the recipient of a 2022 Emmy Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters Award and a 2022 National Educational Telecommunications Association Public Media Award for his roles as host and consultant for the OETA (PBS) documentary film “Tulsa Race Massacre: 100 Years Later.”
Lansana is a three-time International Regional Magazine Award-winning Contributing Editor for Oklahoma Today magazine. A former faculty member of both the Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Drama Division of The Juilliard School, Lansana served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2012 and was Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing there until 2014.
His most recent books include Killing the Negative: A Conversation in Art & Verse (with Joel Daniel Phillips), Opal’s Greenwood Oasis, the skin of dreams: new and collected poems, 1995-2018, The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience & Change Agent) and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop. Forthcoming titles include a hybrid biography of Ralph Ellison, a memoir on the last decade of his mentor, Miss Gwendolyn Brooks, and a series of books on the Black Rodeo. Lansana’s work appears in Best American Poetry 2019.
He is a founding member of Tri-City Collective and serves on the Board of Directors of Oklahoma Humanities and the Tulsa Press Club. Lansana is a Curatorial Scholar for The Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art. He is a Cave Canem alumnus and a member of the first cohort of the Culture of Health Leadership Institute for Racial Healing Fellowship.
