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| Melissa Castillo-Garsow |
Melissa Castillo-Garsow is a Mexican- American writer, poet and scholar currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.
This poem is excerpted from her collection, Coatlicue Eats The Apple
From Part IV.
Maiz
He
holds up an ear
caresses
it lovingly
this
is not just a crop
it's
our culture, he says.
60
years of holding kernels
his
hands are not yet tired
red,
white, black, yellow
here
are the ones he loves
the
ones that grow
here.
These are the mestizos
these
are our culture, he says.
Here
they say the first peoples
were
made of Maiz
after
clay after wood made only
ignorance
and destruction.
Maiz
made 4 men/ 4 women
with
wisdom who populated the earth
and
I believe them.
If
people are 98% water
they
must drink water.
We
are maiz. So we eat
tortilla,
tamale, pozole,
huitlacoche.
they
tell him plant something else
they
tell him work for someone else
they
tell him use these hybrids
We
are the most researched people in the world
and
the least understood.
He
doesn't need instruction on
what
has fed for 8,000 years
He
doesn't need US plants
he
has created his criollos
strong
roots that grow in rock shallow soils
and
impossible humidity
His
research is 50 years of knees
and
hands and hearts in his soil
his
land his feet covering
semilla
after semilla watching
them
grow year after year.
Not
the scientist with 150 lands to report on
Not
the gringo stopping by for a 1-day visit
Not
the government who hands out wrong fertilizer
and
corn that can't survive.
Grow
quiet now. Hear that?
Es
el conocimiento de los antepasados.
Grow
quiet. Hear
that.
It's
the experience of 50 years
knee
deep in dirt.
If
you want to help, be quiet now.
They
will bring the answers.
They
will bring you the answers
in
the rich texture of the criollo
the
dark fibre of their soils
full
of stubborn silences
and
occasional roadblocks
and
you can find it in
the
shadows of their women.
The
Aztec had a counterpoint
to
Centeotl, the god of Maiz.
Chicomecoatl
ruled over agriculture.
Before
jade skirts and spiny belts
adorned
the Maya queen of Maiz.
Now
he says he stubborn.
I
say he's pure mestizo Maiz
drawn
from the Maya who jumped
to
their death rather than
be
conquered.
Maybe
that's the way the world works.
Maybe
it's not enough to say
ancestry,
history, cultura, tradición
But
maybe it's enough to stand upright
and
tell the world:
We
grow corn here.
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