Winner 2024 Environs Prize
Your hands, cracked & worn from harvesting black sorghum, gently massage
the corn ear ‘til a few kernels break free,
pattering on the pinewood tabletop, bugling like winter rain
in the swelling Northeast Kingdom. Let them speak, you say.
Is this what you mean when you speak Algonquian? Words like askoot asquash
in this deep mahogany harvest plunging through time. Thousands of years
in place. Can you say that again? You spill
a few dozen seeds into the hand of an auntie who responds bv saying,
I knew we were still an evil nation when we bombed Iraq,
silenced their seedbanks & spread our GMOs across the Fertile Crescent.
I want to hear the seeds, I do. But what of the fires, pesticides, & soils of war?
What of Bayer absorbing Monsanto? Leaving only twisting chemtrails in our memory.
How did we forget their first painkiller was heroin? You read with your hands.
This Narragansett Corn is its own white petroglyph. This is all morning.
Twenty miles from here, there is a bowl carved from glacial stone
sitting in the navel of Sucker Brook.
Pocasset land of the Pokanoket Nation. Royal lines & dormant roots.
On the northside of the marsh, there is a cedar branch,
that once dried medicinal herbs, still hanging
in the Cuffe Clan’s old farmhouse.
It waits to dry our souls after they have been so patiently steeped
in the language of seed.
Can you say, harmony & convergence again?
With the Pocassets, we organize the people & the land; I organize the water
that freezes & thaws, freezes & thaws to the clear
wedding vows of the two-toned thrush.
You hand me King Philip Corn, husks of Metacom’s war,
to return to Chief Sequan Pijaki. In circles & seeds,
we have learned to be fledglings.
Nathan Erwin
Nathan Erwin is a poet and land-based organizer raised on the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. Erwin currently organizes with the Pocasset Wampanoag Tribe as they fight for land, food, and seed sovereignty. His writing has recently appeared in The Journal, North American Review, Poetry Wales, Hunger Mountain, and Ninth Letter. His organizing and his poetry are conversant, and so he writes about footways, myths, medicine, and wanting.
