Featured Poetry

Rose DeMaris – Song of the Barren Orange Tree Who Is Nourished by Her Own Fallen Leaves

New York City poet Rose DeMaris has given readers a work a elegance and solitude, at times desolate, at times sensuous, at times hopeful and full of self-discovery and self-awareness, and at times, lonely and self-sufficient. “Most of my poetry arises from a place where the natural world, human longings, and various divinities all intersect,” Rose explained to The Dewdrop. “It should be mentioned that the poem is partly inspired by (or “after”) Federico Garcia Lorca’s ‘Song of the Barren Orange Tree’ (translated by W.S. Merwin), a poem I’ve loved for a long time,” she clarified.


Song of the Barren Orange Tree Who Is Nourished by Her Own Fallen Leaves

From the torn leaf it leaks:
curiously fertile
abandonment sap
dense with crystalline
molecules, with salt
and trace star material.

Why did I not
become the pregnant
farm wife, naked
in the yard, watering
her green strawberries?

From the torn leaf it leaks:
night-repertoire of
the mocker
who perches, who
trills, calling for the mate
I call for. I call

out of the torn leaf
and it leaks what I willingly
drink, milk of my own
tattered life, tart
with slight toxicity, but
with scent of crushed

green. I think it, I
grow it, my own rustling
art. I claim it. I lick
my lips desolate
of its precious residue
and then I make more of it.

Rose DeMaris

Rose DeMaris’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly JournalAlaska Quarterly Review, Image JournalRoanoke ReviewQu Literary MagazineVassar ReviewCold Mountain ReviewBig Sky Journal, and elsewhere. She spent many years living, writing, and exploring in Montana before moving to New York City, where she is a Poetry MFA candidate and Teaching Fellow at Columbia University. rosedemaris.com / IG: @rose.demaris

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