My Mother is Singing Her Seed Song
over my brother’s body
buried with the row crops. Goodbye, little century,
little song cut through pain, a bird in the dark.
Too thin, I say to myself. Whose genes?
Too thin to pull up pounds of acorn squash
& cut away first frost. My brother told me
Dr. Kotutwa planted two hundred Hopi corn seed
in a sandy spill then got so drunk
he pissed himself. Downstairs,
my mother is sweeping
the good silverware out the front door
with incense. I call to her— shut
that mouth of silence, La Via Campesina! La Via
Campesina!— No movement.
Where would my brother be, if not a farmer?
If sovereignty was a word? My mind is filled
& fucked with rainfall. Deep soaked earth
& the Center William Rappard, the WTO,
stiffens the air above the lake, erodes
his comings & goings. Tlaxcateca still burns
& my brother & Winona watched the feds
ignite the hemp fields on Pine Ridge.
My brother’s bones are seeds. Archival air.
The air is thick & somebody should’ve put
a bullet into Norman Borlaug’s left ear.
A murmuration of telepathy, a murmuration
of my light harvest. The crow, in songlines,
up from the field
toward a murderous day
Generic Erosion
A night snake’s vertebra
protrudes in the sky far beyond
these fields: sows
Milkweed & Wild Bergamot,
Vervain & Larkspur; all-in
seed economics—select, save,
& breed between the rain showers.
A farmer smokes
cigarillos at the end of her field,
scribbles in her crop notes,
criar y dejarse criar. I pierce
a Narragansett seed with my thumbnail,
then pluck a dog
tick burrowed in my navel.
Corn Smut is a disease
& a delicacy in Mexíco. Right now,
Monsanto-Bayer is editing the last ancient
song out of Echinacea. Seed privatization
& the sound of counting money.
Today marks the sixth day
of farmworkers hiding
in my house from the government.
I do not think of revolution.
If only today were tomorrow.
In this fierce & peaceful season,
gather your genome of tenderness, gather
all your little life cycles before the black frost.
Nathan Erwin is a poet and land-based organizer from the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. He currently operates with the Pocasset Wampanoag tribe as they fight for land, food, & seed sovereignty. His writing has recently appeared in the North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Waxwing, Boulevard, The Journal, Gulf Coast, and Ninth Letter. His organizing and his poetry are conversant, and so he writes about foodways, myths, medicine, and wanting.
