Nathaniel Lachenmeyer is an award-winning disabled author of books for children and adults. His first book, The Outsider, which takes as its subject his late father’s struggles with schizophrenia and homelessness, was published by Broadway Books. Nathaniel has forthcoming/recently published poems, stories and essays with X-R-A-Y, North Dakota Quarterly, Citron Review, Reed Magazine, Potomac Review, Epiphany, Permafrost, Berkeley Poetry Review, About Place Journal, Breakwater Review and DIAGRAM. Nathaniel lives outside Atlanta with his family.
Please visit: www.NathanielLachenmeyer.com
I don’t know
I’m no expert
maybe it is or maybe it isn’t
let’s say it is
let’s say silphium didn’t die
in the gut of a greedy emperor
let’s say the ancient cure-all
survived millennia
as a yellow-blooming weed
in the foothills
of an active volcano
almost two-thousand kilometers
from where the last
living plant was recorded
being eaten by mad Nero
because in a poem
we can do things
like that let’s say it
because if silphium survived
what else might
our terrible human history?
Originally published by Hawaii Pacific Review, 2024
Poetry in this post: © Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
Published with the permission of Nathaniel Lachenmeyer