Amy Gordon
Metamorphosis as a Required Course
Should be mandatory if you run
for office to have spent some part
of your youth as a maple or a cactus,
a towering redwood, a kapok tree
in the rain-forest. Then as senator,
you might sit in your office, remembering
how caterpillars came to feast on your leaves,
for that felt right, didn’t it, when a live, green thing
like you helped feed small creatures? As congressperson,
you might sit at your desk and recall the feeling
of sap running through your capillaries,
the delicious rooting of roots into the ground,
your branches extending into air, amid bird song
and cricket cheer. Do you remember how fond
you were then of the men and women
who came to lean against your trunk?
Amy Gordon is the author of numerous books for young readers, including When JFK Was My Father (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and Painting the Rainbow (Holiday House, 2014), both works of historical fiction haunted by helpful ghosts. Her poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Aurorean, Plum, Blue Nib, and in the anthology Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books, 2018).
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