Vievee Francis from Art X Detroit on Vimeo.

Vievee's work is powerful and visionary. She takes poetry seriously and demands readers do the same - not with cleverness or posturing, but with incredible skill and wisdom.  There's much to gain and learn from her words on multiple levels, each as hard hitting as the next. Here's a representative favorite of mine.

THE SCALE OF EMPIRE

Yet the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive,

characteristic of American scenery is its wildness.

Thomas Cole, founder, Hudson River School

The wood that engulfs

an empire of stone

cares only to maintain itself,

to green again the decadent

progressions – discovery,

desperation. Our delusion:

digging into the earth

that submits only temporarily.

Eventually, the vine creeps across

The well-swept patio, up the walls,

then through, under the iron rails.

The overwrought towers bend

to the runners thin as twine,

and eventually stand only in memory

as ruins even the rats won't enter.

Cut back the undergrowth,

seize the molding dead below,

snip the limbs just at the joint,

the discarded apple will have its revenge

in the rotting – feeding the hungry

world that cracks the sidewalk,

sating the birds that adapt

to the landscape of cities

as easily as a winged roach

that nests in the paneling.

So let us go on –

swatting the locusts that decimate

the ordered fields – insisting upon graphs,

the architecture of command and sequence.

The ants have already mastered

the soil. Small emperors of patience,

they walk a bridge of dinosaur bones.

Audio link to other poems: http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/vievee_francis/index.shtml