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.