A Collection of Poems

By Brennon Land

Not an Immigrant (2020)

Stripped

Of the land

The language

The memory of my people.

Four hundred years of genocide

And still my darkness survives.

Though your words roll off my tongue

Your clothes don’t fit my form.

To you I am a ‘well-spoken.

‘Literate yet uncouth

Unforgivably proud

Irredeemably

Savage.

Love Offerings (2020)

Late season sweet peas

Plump and cold

In a wooden bowl

Smelling of green

And frosty air

Regret (2020)

Regret is waiting

For an opportunity

That will never come

Regret is a life

That was never truly lived

For no good reason

Regret is the name

Never called to your lover

To stop them leaving

Regret is in we

Who have accepted lives spent

Mourning in secret

Dandelion (2020)

Sometimes I wonder

If I roamed the earth

Like a seed on the wind

Would I find the spot

From which my roots were torn

And finally come home

Inversion (2021)

My voice has been folded

In and in and in on itself

So that even when I am loud as I can be

It is smaller than it remembers

Quantum Physics (2019)

Perhaps it is not

The pull of the sun

Which keeps the planets spinning

But the need of the planets

Keeping the sun

In its place

Something Wicked (2018)

She had magic

Enough to shake the world

She used it to build

A cage unbreakable

And there

She made herself

At home

Rest for the Hungry (2017)

Being awakened by hunger

is a myth

created by those

who have never felt it true.

To a starving person

sleep is a reprieve

from the constant gnawing

emptiness that has no certain end.

A way to shorten the time

between feedings.