Gregory Pardlo: Prospect Park, Brooklyn

from “Marginalia”

Note the confection of your body
salt on the breeze, the corn-
silk sky. Olmstead’s signature
archways and meadows. Kite
strings tensing the load of a saddle-
backed wind. This is Prospect Park,
Brooklyn, where limbs tickle
and jounce as if ice cubes shiver
along the shirtsleeves of evergreens. Pond
water whispers, and the echoes of Yankee
fifes linger in wind and in the shirring jazz
hands of leaves, and those shirts,
the skins, the human retinue converging
on the uneven playing fields…

About the Author

Gregory Pardlo

Prize winner, 2015

Totem, received the American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize in 2007. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, as well as anthologies including Angles of Ascent: the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and two editions of Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a fellowship for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received other fellowships from the New York Times, the MacDowell Colony, the Lotos Club Foundation, and Cave Canem. He is currently a teaching fellow in Undergraduate Writing at Columbia University. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for his collection Digest.

Excerpted from poetryfoundation.org