JANICE N. HARRINGTON on

Derrick Austin
Cedars of Lebanon


               His legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold:
​               his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars.
​                                                                                             –Song of Songs 5:15
 
If you can see them, the snow-covered
cedars, crowning the hills, come
 
to the cabin between the two tallest,
their branches hooked
 
with the tantrums of crows.
                                
~~
 
Will you find me without the pink and blue hydrangeas?
 
Will you find me without the spikes of St. Augustine grass?
 
Will you find me with the bloodied snow—where some frail thing was
 
raptured?
 
~~
 
If you find a stag and kill it,
 
throw its hind legs over your shoulder
and drag it to my cabin
between the tallest cedars.
 
Its blood on the snow is my voice pursuing you.
 
~~
 
I sleep on a cedar bed
with red fur blankets,
 
the wood of the gates of paradise,
wood which hid the naked couple.
 
Wood of shame. Wood of passage.
 
If you come, I’ll press my hand
to your chest. A key
 
to the fittings of a lock.
 
~~
 
You knock at the door.
Break several cedar branches
 
and dust off the snow.
Bring in seven for the bedroom,
 
seven for the fireplace,
then rest your head on my chest--
 
even bare
branches can make a kind of summer.

Janice N. Harrington writes poetry and children’s books. She grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both settings, especially rural Alabama, figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second book of poetry, The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, came out in 2011, and her third book, Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin, appeared in 2016. She is also the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for emerging women writers.

Harrington's children’s books have won many awards and citations, including a listing among TIME Magazine’s top 10 children’s books and the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library.

Harrington’s poetry appears regularly in American literary magazines. She has worked as a public librarian and now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois.