[Everything in nature contains its violence]
—for Roxanne (2/19/49 – 11/1/20)
Everything in nature contains its violence:
honeybees trading lives for stings;
electromagnetic waves beheaded for violets.
The human voice can shatter a glass of wine
thanks to sound waves and resonant frequencies.
Everything in nature contains its violence:
hydrangea globes laced with cyanide;
fresh-killed cattle gut strings for violins;
wavelengths of yellow and green rejected by violets,
those ancient flowers of mourning. Like Whitman’s “I”
they contradict themselves, contain multitudes.
Does everything in nature contain its violence,
like a teratoma you always had? The kind
with hair, teeth, muscle, and bone that suddenly grows?
Nothing to stop the malignant wave spreading like violets,
coming back wild each spring, rhizomes finding
their way underground, roots shooting out of nodes
to form wave after wave of invading violets.
Not everything in nature contains its violence.
by Nancy Naomi Carlson.
Ms. Carlson is a clinical mental health counselor educator and twice an NEA translation grantee.
She also won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019), her recent collection of non-translated poetry, was called “new & noteworthy” by The New York Times.