Carrot

by Leah Naomi Green

Take all summer,
your ember

from the sun,
its walking meditation.

Store it in small
vaults of light

to keep
the rest of us

when winter seals
around each day.

We’ll flicker
to the table.

We’ll gather
to your orange flame.

Read this and other poems by Leah Naomi Green in The More Extravagant Feast, Graywolf Press, 2020.

I love poems that take the most humble of subjects and transform them into something transcendent, using only the power of the writer’s close attention. Reading Leah Naomi Green’s poem, I think of what Rabbi Abraham Herschel once wrote: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement . . . get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” This short, deceptively simple poem, which recalls the odes of Pablo Neruda and those of contemporaries like Ross Gay and Dorianne Laux, does just that as it imagines a carrot in the ground, stoking its “ember//from the sun” all summer long. Though I’d never before considered how the inside of a carrot looks, Green shows us those “small/vaults of light,” each slice of which contains summer’s brightness and heat. She also envisions the light of the sun as a kind of “walking meditation” as it passes across the garden throughout the day, reminding us of the slow yet miraculous process of growth by which we are all fed. Even as short a sentence as “We’ll flicker/to the table,” evokes the scene of a family grown weary in the dim winter months, yet finally lit up again by the simple presence of a vegetable that continues to nourish us long after it was pulled from the earth.

Invitation for Writing & Reflection: Choose some humble, seemingly ordinary thing and write a poem (perhaps a kind of ode) addressed to it. You might choose as your object something you particularly love, but which others might find too plain or even strange to be worthy of praise.

ABOUT THE POET: Leah Naomi Green

Leah Naomi Green is the author of The More Extravagant Feast (Graywolf Press, 2020), selected by Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets. She is the recipient of a 2021 Treehouse Climate Action Poetry Prize from The AAP, as well as the 2021 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Green teaches environmental studies and English at Washington and Lee University. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Paris Review, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, The Southern Review, Orion, Shenandoah, Ecotone, and Pleiades. Green lives in the mountains of Virginia where she and her family homestead and grow food.

POETRY SELECTION AND COMMENTARY BY JAMES CREWS

James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. James teaches at SUNY-Albany and lives with his husband in Vermont.

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