you must believe in spring

One way to compel attention is to deploy shiny language that insists on the uniqueness of some current circumstance: unprecedented, original, new. But seasons belie the pretense that history is a series of successive frontiers. When I encountered Kemi Alabi’s poem “you must believe in spring,” I wasn’t sure whether the title was nudging me toward the tinny hope of triumphalism—with “spring” signifying a better future in contrast to the poem’s opening scene of “a pasty snow” and “virus news”— or rooting me in the steadfast persistence of natural cycles. The poem, however, upends my own binary thinking, reminding me that this structure of thought is itself rooted in what we’ve done to the world. Alabi writes: “you would trade a skull of yes/no for quiet, two slushed thoughts / per foot below, but there it goes dewing the frost of your plan: // star witness to original sin, atlantic turned accomplice.” Just as the dew that disrupts the frost is not a romanticized onwardness that pretends it can discard the past, but an inevitable thawing of history that swells the present, the “virus news” summons the transatlantic slave trade, as its old racist blueprints structure what passes as new. And yet, other elements persist, too— “tongues flung overboard,” “sun cupping your cheek.” Alabi’s poem thus opens onto a way forward that is also a way back: a season, a spell, spring.

– Claire Schwartz