An excerpt from the opening section

END HUNGER!

Axblade and throbbing helve come crashing through

American conscience comatose frontier

The scream of hunger sharper than horror

a scream peopled by voiceless streetcallers

camped upon curbs coughing vertebrae into grates.

They are heard like a self heard through bones.

In sepulchres of heartland hills

the reclining agrarian dead

pain to hear them

and in their granitewear skin waken

still holding cosmos flowers from seventy summer gardens,

dried bouquets twined upon their chests,

still remembering the hammering heart

from terror at the tinyness of a seed,

the perilous mutuality of being its knower and grower

while being the seed’s reason to grow

and beggar for that reason’s need; even supplying

the being out of which is imagined and made

the hoe, the sickle, harrow, wheelbarrow.

The buried prairiedweller

was the body that was the work

who in that work’s contortions, year by year,

became like the thrust and worried glide of plow,

like the sweat-bathed, wheezing, burdened beast,

for the sake of yield, became the seed’s own How.

Sowers and reapers claybound corpses

who dwell in the pavilion of the cotyledon

take the paroxysmal quavering cry

of simulated Indias in American cities

screaming silently enough to wake the dead;

take that cry as their own

like a ewe claims a bleating lamb.

Four hundred generations of cropgrowers

answer the cry of the alienated American

from deep beneath life-giving soil.

They groan in the form of storm

in a montage of emblems of their writhing souls,

dust, orange vapor, chaff,

they wail in a wind whirling and crashing

against concrete urban premises of arrogance.

A shout from beloved rubble

of grottoes of stratified skulls,

pelvic fragments, mandibles, femora

of leathery people whose squinting eyes

saw the horizon of North America

like a flaring rim bowl, stenciled

against melting Pleistocene ice sheets,

and crossed over, shouting,

with herds of mastodon and bison.

In their deposits of dream and memory,

in their station of spirit slumber

looted by slugs and rats,

in their calcium existence buried beside dogs,

the shaman still clucks his chant into swaying smoke,

the warrior youth still sings at the coyote’s instruction,

the squaw still holds to her heart,

then fastens to her hair,

bird effigy as token of marriage;

jars, amulets, awls within arms’ reach;

bone needles, stone adzes

glazed with clairvoyance come from human grasp;

deer effigy head, beaver tooth gouge

outstay their plagued and fevered flesh.

© 2005 MacCanon Brown. All Rights Reserved.