ALIEN SEEDS
Wendy Rose

             (on reading a book about plants growing wild in California)

​How is it that I did not know the gold hillside near my house
is as foreign to the land as any intruder, as the straight boards
and liquid rock poured onto the land where my house stands?
All these, wild oats, the strangling grass, even the succulents
with the secret of moisture within, the tumbleweed
rode on the tails of strange beasts or were caught
in the wool of Spanish sheep. How can I not feel
the killing, the massacre that cleared the valley, the foothills,
the mountains of my kind? For every seed, its wagon train;
rhizomes colonize underground, spines catch foxes
on their little hooks--barbed wire crosses our nations
and taproots suck the stolen dew
no matter how dry the desert.
Thistles thrive on the most ravaged flesh;
invaders ruthlessly kill just as the bloodthirsty men
who drove their cattle from shrine to shrine
lowered their rifles, aimed, fired.
The Elders have always known this.
They fast and pray, then hunt
for exactly the right kind of grass
as their grandmothers before them;
they pick a few, never the first one,
never more than they need.
They return home with great art in their eyes.
And now they walk forever with empty hands,
baskets made thin with ribs sticking out.
Beads, yarn, safety pins replace beargrass and willow.
Eucalyptus rolls its seeds on the ground,
we slip and fall, hurtle into the sacrifice,
gather not grass but sorrow in our hands.
Vanishing Americans, endangered species,
vermin and weeds, call it what they will,
rock hard places where bones rattle down.