Introduction: The nature of African American poetry / Camille T. Dungy --
Cycle one: Just looking. We must be careful / Ed Roberson --
the earth is a living thing / Lucille Clifton --
The mountains of California: part I / Al Young --
The mountain road ends here / G.E. Patterson --
Queen Anne's lace / June Jordan --
On summer / George Moses Horton --
The yellow jacket / Nikki Giovanni --
Eclogue at twilight / Yusef Komunyakaa --
Ruellia noctiflora / Marilyn Nelson --
Evening primrose / Rita Dove --
The night-blooming cereus / Robert Hayden --
A September night / George Marion McClellan --
Sweet enough ocean, cotton / Thylias Moss --
Metamorphism / Helene Johnson --
a brown girl's nature poem : provincetown / Toni Wynn --
What more? / Gerald Barrax Sr. --
be careful / Ed Roberson --
Watching blackbirds turn to ghosts / Rachel Eliza Griffiths --
If winter comes, can spring? / Alvin Aubert --
"31 words * prose poems [#12]" / Rita Shockley.
Cycle two: Nature, be with us. We are not strangers here / Ravi Howard --
For a farmer / James A. Emanuel --
To waste at trees / Gerald Barrax Sr. --
White dog / Carl Phillips --
you must walk this lonesome / Evie Shockley --
Down from the houses of magic / Cyrus Cassells --
The ephemera / George Marion McClellan --
Sleepwalker on the mountain / Ruth Ellen Kocher --
Aphrodite of economy / Mark McMorris --
Arachis hypogaea / Marilyn Nelson --
In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, thinking of Rachel Carson / Anthony Walton --
Language / Camille T. Dungy --
For Alice Walker (a summertime tanka) / June Jordan --
generations / Lucille Clifton --
Work / Yusef Komunyakaa --
Poem to my child, if ever you shall be / Ross Gay --
To a certain lady, in her garden / Sterling Brown --
Urban nature / Ed Roberson --
September songs / Reginald Shepherd.
Cycle three: Dirt on our hands. from "12 million Black voices" / Richard Wright --
Another April / Anne Spencer --
Barriers / Gerald Barrax Sr. --
A young peacock / Lenard D. Moore --
Urban renewal: XIII / Major Jackson --
The bees / Audre Lorde --
Carrion / Anthony Walton --
look at the blackbird fall / June Jordan --
Flight of the California condor / Wanda Coleman --
Since everyone can never be safe / Camille T. Dungy --
Won't be but a minute / Patricia Smith --
Called / Michael S. Harper --
Harvest song / Jean Toomer --
A Black man talks of reaping / Arna Bontemps --
Wood and rain / Melvin Dixon --
Joy in the woods / Claude McKay --
Sorrow home / Margaret Walker --
Blues aubade (or, Revision of the lean, post-modernist pastorale) / Honorée Fanonne Jeffers --
April is on the way / Alice Dunbar-Nelson.
Cycle four: Pests, people too. Boll weevils, coyotes, and the color of nuisance / C.S. Giscombe --
Miscarriage in October with ladybugs / Amber Flora Thomas --
Man reading in bed by a window with bugs / Gregory Pardlo --
Ambition II : mosquito in the mist / Tim Seibles --
The market / Thomas Sayers Ellis --
For those who need a true story / Tara Betts --
Postcard to an ecologist / Lenard D. Moore --
Nature boy / C.S. Giscombe --
A plague of starlings / Robert Hayden --
O believer / Janice N. Harrington --
The Brown menace, or, Poem to the survival of roaches / Audre Lorde --
Life / Kwame Alexander --
What a snakehead discovered in a Maryland pond and a poet in corporate America have in common / Kamilah Aisha Moon --
The lost conquistador / Shane Book --
the beginning of the end of the world / Lucille Clifton --
Carpenter bee / Natasha Trethewey --
Yellowjackets / Yusef Komunyakaa.
Cycle five: Forsaken of the earth. The flowers / Alice Walker --
On imagination / Phillis Wheatley --
For Saundra / Nikki Giovanni --
The natural world / G.E. Patterson --
Lament for dark peoples / Langston Hughes --
White things / Anne Spencer --
The haunted oak / Paul Laurence Dunbar --
from "Rape of Florida," canto I / Albery Whitman --
Swimchant of nigger mer-folk : (an aquaboogie set in lapis) / Douglas Kearney --
Water USA / Clarence Major --
Migration / Major Jackson --
February leaving / Ruth Ellen Kocher --
blue horses / Ed Roberson --
Sick man looks at flowers / Gwendolyn Brooks --
Prodigal / Arna Bontemps --
potters' field / Cynthia Parker-Ohene --
Monument / Natasha Trethewey.
Cycle six: Disasters, natural and other. Disasters, nature, and poetry / Mona Lisa Saloy --
Floodtide / Askia M. Touré --
Children of the Mississippi / Sterling Brown --
Emmett Till / James A. Emanuel --
sign post / devorah major --
Sacred history of the earth / G.E. Patterson --
A greenness taller than gods / Yusef Komunyakaa --
San Francisco, spring 1986 / Patricia Spears Jones --
The cure / Carl Phillips --
Liturgy / Natasha Trethewey --
Earthquake blues / Ishmael Reed --
Erasure / Amber Flora Thomas --
Floodsong 2 : water moccasin's spiritual / Douglas Kearney --
Requiem / Anne Spencer --
Ice storm / Robert Hayden.
Cycle seven: Talk of the animals. A shepherd's tale / Sean Hill --
Black-and-white dusk at Limantour Beach / Rachel Eliza Griffiths --
Sympathy / Paul Laurence Dunbar --
The sea-turtle and the shark / Melvin B. Tolson --
European folk tale variant / Harryette Mullen --
Man raised as chicken / Wendy S. Walters --
The spider speaks / Shara McCallum --
The hummingbird / Cyrus Cassells --
The herd / Tim Seibles --
Speed / Cornelius Eady --
Points of view / Ishmael Reed --
Requiem for a nest / Wanda Coleman --
Surfaces and masks: XXX / Clarence Major --
The minks / Toi Derricotte --
Possum / Janice N. Harrington --
The appaloosa / Afaa Michael Weaver --
April lyric/All I know is / G.E. Patterson.
Cycle eight: What the land remembers. April in Eatonton / Honorée Fanonne Jeffers --
Jaguaripe / Myronn Hardy --
What there was / Janice N. Harrington --
Wind talker / Frank X Walker --
mulberry fields / Lucille Clifton --
I am Black and the trees are green / E. Ethelbert Miller --
The maple remains / Amaud Jamaul Johnson --
Tallahatchie lullaby, baby / Douglas Kearney --
Out in the country of my country / June Jordan --
Three days of forest, a river, free / Rita Dove --
American light / Claudia Rankine --
Look ahead, look south : the future / C.S. Giscombe --
Southern song / Margaret Walker --
her table mountain / Evie Shockley --
from "Juneteenth : the bicentennial poem" / Sherley Anne Williams --
Tap-root / Indigo Moor --
Last talk with Jim Hardwick / Marilyn Nelson --
History as apple tree / Michael S. Harper.
Cycle nine: Growing out of this land. Writing home / Camille T. Dungy --
The millpond / Yusef Komunyakaa --
Seven pastorals at sixteen / Sean Hill --
Before a screen door / Janice N. Harrington --
Two directions / C.S. Giscombe --
My grandfather walks in the woods / Marilyn Nelson --
Mississippi gardens / Stephanie Pruitt --
I called them trees / Gerald Barrax Sr. --
Beaches: why I don't care for them / Wanda Coleman --
At 57, my father learns to grow things / Ruth Ellen Kocher --
Suburban noir / Gregory Pardlo --
Letter to the local police / June Jordan --
Homeopathic / Frank X Walker --
What my child learns of the sea / Audre Lorde --
The ritual of season / Remica L. Bingham --
More than once in caves / Mark McMorris --
Pachuta, Mississippi/A memoir / Al Young.
Cycle ten: Comes always spring. First skunk of spring / Marilyn Nelson --
[Earth, I thank you] / Anne Spencer --
Bemidji in spring / Sean Hill --
Winter poem / Nikki Giovanni --
After the winter / Claude McKay --
For Alexis / Joanne V. Gabbin --
Spring down / George Marion McClellan --
Deep in the quiet wood / James Weldon Johnson --
Violets / Alice Dunbar-Nelson --
The man, his bowl, his raspberries / Claudia Rankine --
What to eat, and what to drink, and what to leave for poison / Camille T. Dungy --
Earth song / Langston Hughes --
Rondeau / Jessie Redmon Fauset --
Southern living / Kendra Hamilton --
Geraniums / Elizabeth Alexander --
My Mississippi spring / Margaret Walker --