Alison Hicks’ most recent poem to appear here was “The Winter Magician” (December 2019).

Where I Come From
By Alison Hicks

A place of seasons, mixed forest, evergreens, and hardwoods.
Where sugar maples turn orange and red, whose sap,
collected in spring, boiled down, is poured hot onto snow.

I grew up in a farmhouse that had once been a tavern,
on the road to a town now sunk beneath a reservoir.
There was no heat upstairs, only what rose.

I have traveled to warmer places, pitched a tent in the desert,
watched the sun set below raised arms of saguaros,
sipping from a thermos of mulled wine.

Then back to places of granite and rain, smell of leaf-litter.
I live on a warming planet and struggle to know what that means:
lesser snows, greater rains, drought, flood, disaster.

I have stretched my body out on the Canadian Shield.
I’ve lost the trail many times, then found it,
or maybe just another one.