New Orleans poet Gina Ferrara writes a poem of awareness, inevitability, permanence, and nature, the lines of which are gathered around the shores of a sluggish river. Gina told The Dewdrop that her beloved city, New Orleans, has a way of seeping into her poetry, and her beautiful “Along Its Course” is an elegant example of that.
Along Its Course Once you lived close to an opaque river, reluctantly reflecting the stars, ink black at night, bloody brown by day, a river that could mark true permanence more than a stain, in perpetual search of the vast, its cursive signature swift current, steering barges with an omniscience of births and deaths that come unplanned. You would count the pelicans, dappled down, diving, no longer endangered, near the rocks you made sculptures of haphazard towers, more slanted than upright, unlike the cypresses all stature with wispy bristles, their protuberances reminiscent as bones ready to breach skin.
Gina Ferrara
Gina Ferrara lives in New Orleans. She has four poetry collections, including the most recent, Weight of the Ripened, published by Dos Madres Press in 2020. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Tar River Poetry, The Naugatuck Review, and The Poetry Ireland Review. She curates The Poetry Buffet, a reading series that happens the first Saturday of most months.