Freeform poetry in six parts:
i. Cornfields
ii. Cattle
iii. Industry
iv. Locust Summer
v. Killdeer
vi. Gravel Roads
Maize. She sings
soft crow-songs, lit alight by blood-moon fire.
I’m racing down the backroads highway by evening.
Soft nocturnal-furred things burrow in this ground. I’m rooted
here by my faith, here by my heritage;
in dreams seeds fall through my fingers, inheritance,
the world is spinning, the green is sprouting
underfoot. In summer
harvest comes, and we raise our hands.
Crane our necks up to the sky. We grow
only to grow. We feel only to feel,
the silks silent in the gentle light,
the dirt below giving birth each night.
These are the cattle raids
of the modern day. Of the hour. Our people
ride out, each day, and each night
come home smeared in ground and grass:
thieves for kind and country, rebels to
a new world order’s yoke. Our kings
are crowned in silken sashes. Our princes
ride purring motor horses. Our sovereign queen
she walks, down a pavilion of gold, and she knows
what tomorrow holds: we will bow our necks.
America puts its children to the test.
The heirs of the new world are put to rest.
In sleep, we clasp hands and dream.
Our steeds gallop across gravel
and do not complain of ailed hooves. Our feet
know well the price of liberty. Work
is our name: our skies are gray
with smokestack air, and our hands
are black with coal. They stripped our lands
and carved our name deep in earth,
left our mark, forevermore. And now
we swim in the jagged streams
we dug. I have not lived
a single year, in this dirt-low life
without the earth beneath
my fingernails. I am this dirt.
In summer. Locusts serenade
us; they do not come down in plagues,
Biblical, as we are haunted; but instead
rise up, from eggs, like little birds.
Like most I was once a child
and once I played them like guitar strings
by a man at the crossroads: once,
I plucked with tiny fingers insects
that would not last the year, each one
made a different sound, like keys
on the chain,
and together we made a song:
the trees whispered me,
the burning bushes,
notes on a string.
Our graves
are overrun. Jagged leaves
populate the grassy hills
where we lay our dead. I once held
the fragile skull of a killdeer.
Killdeer: a funny beast. It sings
a terrible song, cries out:
a broken wing.
Its nests are lined with
the cotton shirts from our backs.
Its speckled eggs are like
a broken pine box. Left in the rocks,
the killdeer cries out: to man, to god,
to preying beast. Away it flies.
Love is a foreign thing when it survives.
The roads are longest
when you run away.
But we always come back:
who am I to say
when my piece is done? I continue to play
little songs with locust bands,
locust peoples who live on locust lands.
Loaned out to the coal-black hands
of denim-clad and tone-deaf man.
Out here in the countryside,
underneath its smokestack sky,
the foremost feeling is regret.
But I am not leaving yet:
My gravel roads carry me, for now, on.
Here, in wood and dirt, then gone. §
Nemeton Nigromanticos 