Category: nostalgia

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fawn

On By ©️K.T. 2026In agraria, anthropocene, autobiographical, Birth, Chicago, confessional, confessional poetry, Crone, crone chronicles, Crone Consciousness, death and other endings, deer, dirt road chronicles, earthlings, ecocide, fauna, from the inner city to outer rural, heartbreak, maternity, May, Mother, Mother's Day, Motherhood, nostalgia, Poem, poet, poetry, ruralia, timeLeave a comment

yester day
i counted more than 30 birds, here
first i kept a running list in my head
then, i made a google doc to share

i didn’t even know there was an organized
bird migration count happening
until after the fact

this morning,
it finally felt
vernal
warm, new air,
a gentle breeze
the exact kind of day to find a fawn nested in the tall grasses around a mulberry or walnut tree
while her mother is off foraging

every one is being born today
every one is dying today

somewhere

it seems //

i can’t remember what it feels like to be a beloved daughter
i can’t remember what it feels like to be a loving daughter

now, repeat those sentences with the word mother instead of daughter

everything is drifting,
has drifted

everything thing is being pulled away,
has pulled away

the gravity of me is no longer enough
to hold these familiar bodies in orbit

in a system of we,
in a galaxy of us

we existed,

only on paper, i think.

but not on kodak paper — you hated photos

///

today,

on “World Migratory Bird Day”

the May Plow arrived even as every one is

gestating,
laboring,
birthing,
nesting,
laying,
nursing

birds, turtles, deer,
chipmunks,
turkeys,
geese and snakes

the timing of these men with their machines is so detached

from the cycle of Earthen life:

mothering,
laying,
arriving,
hatching,
latching,
nursing
feeding

raising and rearing.

the products of men with their machines are fertilized with phosphate, nitrogen, ammonia, urea
unironically sourced from the Fertile Crescent
shipped via the Strait of Hormuz
because their forefathers, not foremothers, strip-mined the soil of Turtle Island, barren, a hundred years or more, ago

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Hydrangea nostalgia

On By ©️K.T. 2026In flora, from the inner city to outer rural, july, Lajuana Lampkins, nostalgia, PoemLeave a comment
revised for the fourth of july, 2025
voluminous, meandering hydrangea shrub
july 2023

This Hydrangea nostalgia bush was grown from a 2017 autumn cutting from its parent which is, or was, located in the front yard of my brick 2-flat in the northwest side neighborhood of Portage Park in Chicago. One of a half-dozen or so white hydrangeas planted by me in the late 90s, I had nurtured and obsessed over them for nearly 23 years — this one is now the lone survivor in my care at my rural home in Michigan.

lilac cuttings,
rooting hormone solution,
and growing medium,
September 23, 2017
(not even one of these most precious lilac cuttings rooted and survived)
a box of hope.
autumn hydrangea & lilac cuttings,
not ideal for propagation,
but ready for transport and transplant
to Michigan

But the genesis of my city girl hydrangea devotion was not Martha Stewart’s ubiquitous “Living” magazine, also of 1990s — though she certainly named, informed, inspired and validated many a hydrangea obsession within those pages — rather, it was the nostalgic ubiquity of enormous white snowball blooms and arresting blue-purple poms on heritage shrubs that I admired, coveted, played and hid among during my childhood summers spent with my maternal grandparents in Murphysboro — a sleepy, rural town in Southern Illinois — where my maternal great, great grandmother, my great grandmother and grandmother were all born.

I was entranced by those plants each summer — yet without the language to name and fully describe them to my mother when I returned back home to the Chicago Housing Authority’s Lathrop Homes aka “the projects” – which usually, was just in the nick of time for back-to-school in late August. Interestingly, I don’t recall ever drawing a picture of hydrangeas or taking a photo of them with my hard-earned Kodak Instamatic pocket camera as a child – even though I frequently used both methods to capture/record my favorite things. //

“Nostalgia Kills”

Nostalgia is a psychologically pining for a sweeter but largely false time in our lives — a naive, shallow or ignorant time that we prefer to, that we choose to, remember as “innocence” or romanticize, idealize or distort as the “best times of my life” or the “good ol’ days”.

Instead of thoroughly revisiting the entirety of the time, place, people or experience, nostalgia often robs — or kills — the opportunity for true introspection and material dialectics. ///

early July 2023

Nostalgia sounds like the name of the a psychological condition catalyzed by avoiding “dis-ease”

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