Herman Beavers: TRUE NORTH • Cleaver Magazine

Poetry by Herman Beavers
TRUE NORTH

Sidereal & reassuring, light
attired in the color of plums.
Aching with sap, the trees’
throb of sweetness’s like
a ghost
vexing me.
Grass browning
under its pointed stare,
a ground hog, back curved among
the sycamore leaves, presses close
against the gravel,
dragging
its famished, sullen rib cage.
The night crashes open: twigs
and mud, stale bread, so little
motivation. In the chime of twilight
shadows
masquerading as power.
In the reel of things, escape a scheme
so dazzling it brings me to tears;
I can’t help but to hug myself
warm. In despondent &
dubious skirmish, I
wave colorful
flags like a poultice; shifting
vital attention away from
all that moaning, the click
and wander of the compass
my thrash, my umbrage, my
sleepwalk, my bottomland
an isthmus
forever straining toward
True North.

Herman Beavers’ most recent poems have appeared in The Langston Hughes Colloquy, MELUS, Versadelphia, Cleaver Magazine, The American Arts Quarterly, and Supplement, Vol. 2. His poems are anthologized in the volumes Obsession: Sestinas for the Twenty-First Century (University Press of New England), Moonstone Press), Who Will Speak for America (Temple UP) and in the forthcoming volume, Show Us Your Papers (Mainstreet Rag Press). His chapbook, Obsidian Blues, was published in 2017 by Agape Editions as part of its Morning House Chapbook Series. His latest books are Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and The Vernell Poems (Moonstone Press, 2019). In 2023, he was selected to be a Resident Fellow at La Maison du Dora Maar in Menerbes, France. He serves on the Advisory Boards of Modern Fiction Studies, The Black Scholar, Public Humanities, and African American Review.