Svetlana Nikitina – Black-Brown-Black

Poet Svetlana Nikitina juxtapositions the hand of humankind on wilderness in her poem “Black-Brown-Black”. On one side of the mountain featured in her poem, Svetlana displays the coarse hide of the wilderness tamed by society, while the other remains unburnished, rough, and free. Svetlana explained to The Dewdrop that “Black-Brown-Black” explores a Zen moment of awakened attention in the natural world, a mountain which rewards the observer’s sustained attention.

Black-Brown-Black

From the top of Tunnel Mountain—
On one side—
A town below—
Golf courses. Ski runs.
Cheery chalets.
Flowers in beds, borders, boxes,
Pink-lavender-blue-red…
Gondolas
Gliding your eye
To the top
And back.

On the other side—nothing
But mountaintops bared, bald.
Whitebark pines below—
Dull rhyme of somber green
Played by fire,
Wind, scarce sun.
Sinkholed meadow below
Left to the birds,
Black bears and elk.
Sky strewn
With cloud rags
Torn up and scattered
In a fading grid—

The eye gondolas over
Colorbursts of flower beds
And gingerbread houses
To land on the bare slopes,
To sink into the waffled gray of the sky,
The scruffy peaks, mottled meadow,
Mountain mass
Pinned
By the dark, dusty green.

Eye seeks no candy,
Tunes into the dull rhyme
Of rock striations:
Black-Brown-Black…
And listens to silence,
The pulse of the pines
Strong and steady
As a heartbeat.

Svetlana Nikitina

Svetlana Nikitina is a poet and creative nonfiction writer whose work explores memory, silence, family inheritance, migration, and belonging. Born in Russia to a family with Ukrainian roots and now living in the United States, she is interested in the ways history inhabits ordinary lives and travels across generations. She teaches literature at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. Her writing draws on personal and cultural histories, the natural world, and questions of voice, identity, and belonging. Her poems have appeared in Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems and the anthology In Other Words.