Pollen rains - Carmen Bugan - Literary Matters

With the green-golden dust that settles on the windowsills before the Saturday cleaning, come the butterfly-like petals landing on our shirts, between white strawberry flowers, piles of soft pink under trees.

The air is thick. Trees drop caterpillars on the road, blue half-shells of robins’ eggs. Before the end of June the house will be coated in pollen dust, our windows will need washing, windowpanes will be green as moss.

The children and I go out in the pollen rains and are doused in them, stained and sneezing, watery-eyed, thrilled. At the end of June we will leave you pacing in the house in the dark room, we will drive away in the gray morning, pollen dust on the car windshield.

May 22, 2021

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Carmen Bugan

Carmen Bugan, a George Orwell Prize Fellow, is the author of six poetry collections, a memoir, and a critical study. Time Being, her collection of poems about the pandemic, was published in 2022. Her new and selected poems, Lilies from America, was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, won the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, and was a finalist in the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her monograph on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile, and her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression: Essays on Politics and Poetics are widely praised. She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford University, UK. Bugan, who was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan, lectures at universities, international book fairs and conferences, and has been a guest on current affairs and history programs on the BBC, ABC, NPR, The Foreign Desk. She is currently an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University.

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