swamp poem (i)
we came to see gators of course but
saw ourselves in a new wetness.
this is an environment, different
than we’ve known. in a new place
you learn fastest at first, a child
adapting to challenges, joys.
everything touches me; i give body.
on the other side of the imprint
i feel myself, greener and browner
and palmetto hands and still wetness and
little green eyelets observing and
absorbing the surface and i
and the tiny bubbles and the novel birdcall
and the thick moss floating loose and high
held by the trees like the lightest kitestring,
myself in the wind and the wind.
Blue Ridge
Rich is this new land, green the color of abundance.
There is not a surface insight uncovered of living
Breathers, lovers of light and obsessive rains.
The peoples of the world could live good lives here,
Folded into verdant hollows overflowing with blessings
Soft and understanding like these oldest mountains
Well worn with the ways of this wild world,
Watery and relinquishing of all rockiness—
A waving shape which will approach but never reach
The limit of acceptance.
Green bleeds into blue along my edgeless vision
Seamlessly, greenblue shading into infinite distance as
A westward fog of continental possibilities,
Contingent and contiguous
With the mystery of myself.
Aidan Fitzsimons ’25 (aidan_fitzsimons@college.harvard.edu) wrote these poems in dialogue with the land while hitchhiking and living in a bus around America.