Imitating Innocence, by D. A. Gray

The Dance, by Andre Derain (France) 1906

Imitating Innocence
 
We walked into the forest wearing
costumes we did not understand,
our bodies gyrated, hopped,
imagined the survival songs
of tree frogs to be a music made for us.
 
We searched for our innocence, danced
on the body of a snake because we’d
read it once had a human voice and
would not now be a snake, not here.
 
Naked, we mimicked a movement
we did not understand, and thought
we had escaped a savage civilization.
Repairing that society – it did not interest us.
 
We protested our innocence, alone
in those woods, whose citizens, alarmed,
retreated into a darkness we did not understand.

D. A. Gray

D. A.  Gray is the author of Contested Terrain (FutureCycle Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Still: The Journal, Collateral Journal and Wrath-Bearing Tree among others.  He earned his MFA at the Sewanee School of Letters.  Gray now teaches, writes and lives in Central Texas.