The Serengeti Plain, Tanzania, 2010
The elephant outside our tent,
who carries a cattle egret on her back,
is the gray of a silk ribbon,
the Paynes gray color you might choose
for a watercolor. Her nature
is to love, not with the carelessness
or boredom of a human,
but rather as an orchid adores
the grasslands where it grew.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 1.
Elizabeth Coleman is the editor of Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), and the author of two poetry collections: Proof (Spuyten Duyvil Press 2012), a University of Wisconsin Press prizes finalist, and The Fifth Generation (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as three chapbooks (including Autumn in a Solitary Time, The Hudson Valley, 2020 [Audience Askew, November 2023], a collaboration with photographer, Michael Craig Palmer). She translated into French Lee Slonimsky’s sonnet collection, Pythagoras in Love/Pythagore, Amoureux (Folded Word Press, 2016). Her new collection was a finalist for the 2022 Cider Press Editors’ Book Prize and the 2023 Marsh Hawk Press Prize, and a quarter finalist for the 2023 Able Muse Press Prize. Several of her poems are Pushcart Prize nominees. For many years, she was a public interest attorney, and received an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. She lives in New York City, and in the Catskill Forest Preserve with her husband, a civil rights attorney.
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