Skip to main content
By Rickey Laurentiis

About the dead having available to them
all breeds of knowledge,
some pure, others wicked, especially what is
future, and the history that remains
once the waters recede, revealing the land
that couldn’t reject or contain it, and the land
that is not new, is indigo, is ancient, lived
as all the trees that fit and clothe it are lived,
simple pine, oak, grand magnolia, he said
they frighten him, that what they hold in their silences
silences: sometimes a boy will slip
from his climbing, drown but the myth knows why,
sometimes a boy will swing with the leaves.


Source: Poetry (November 2012)

  • Arts & Sciences
  • Living
  • Mythology & Folklore

Poet Bio

Rickey Laurentiis
Rickey Laurentiis grew up in New Orleans and earned an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. They are the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press). Boy with Thorn also won the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. A 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry fellow, they have also received awards from the Whiting Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  They are the inaugural fellow in creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. See More By This Poet

More Poems about Arts & Sciences

Browse poems about Arts & Sciences

More Poems about Living

Browse poems about Living

More Poems about Mythology & Folklore

Browse poems about Mythology & Folklore Get a random poem