In Praise of Eastern Soil
Sodden and black: mulch of burnt flax,
rusted plow teeth, and the crossfire between continents.
The wheat-fields of Galicia have long cradled
jawbone and jacket button; and along
the slow-bending Dniester, knuckle fragments
glint where boots once marched in triplet rhythm.
I find femurs in the Don basin, frost-fed;
breastbones in Bessarabian loam, pale
and furrow-worn like pencils. The spade turns
and turns again; there—a wedding ring,
the wire twist of spectacles, all this sediment.
History watered by restless rains that have paced the land
for thousands of years. Let it fall and seep
the Baltic peat where brothers disappeared in the gaps
between census lines and execution ditches.
Bury your fingers: cartilage, shell casing,
thimble, rosary bead. Every morsel of
marrowed dust has a name that makes
the grass stoop from remembering.
All That Sweetness After
Blind moles navigate the ferment of the fallout,
snouts twitching like Geiger clicks
between roots coiled into barbed hieroglyphs.
The light has a greenish fatigue, open skin
looking for anything to blame God for.
All that’s left for him to walk among are
the nettles that bandage the land’s scarred belly.
When we found the artillery shell, the orchard
was thick with the fruit-flesh of pears and wasps
humming in summer’s pulp. All afternoon
we kept our voices low. The ones where we’d
carry it home. The ones where we’d bury it deeper.
Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty. Her writing appears in the Stinging Fly, the Shore, Josephine Quarterly, and Meniscus Literary Journal, among others. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.
Sodden and black: mulch of burnt flax,
rusted plow teeth, and the crossfire between continents.
The wheat-fields of Galicia have long cradled
jawbone and jacket button; and along
the slow-bending Dniester, knuckle fragments
glint where boots once marched in triplet rhythm.
I find femurs in the Don basin, frost-fed;
breastbones in Bessarabian loam, pale
and furrow-worn like pencils. The spade turns
and turns again; there—a wedding ring,
the wire twist of spectacles, all this sediment.
History watered by restless rains that have paced the land
for thousands of years. Let it fall and seep
the Baltic peat where brothers disappeared in the gaps
between census lines and execution ditches.
Bury your fingers: cartilage, shell casing,
thimble, rosary bead. Every morsel of
marrowed dust has a name that makes
the grass stoop from remembering.
All That Sweetness After
Blind moles navigate the ferment of the fallout,
snouts twitching like Geiger clicks
between roots coiled into barbed hieroglyphs.
The light has a greenish fatigue, open skin
looking for anything to blame God for.
All that’s left for him to walk among are
the nettles that bandage the land’s scarred belly.
When we found the artillery shell, the orchard
was thick with the fruit-flesh of pears and wasps
humming in summer’s pulp. All afternoon
we kept our voices low. The ones where we’d
carry it home. The ones where we’d bury it deeper.
Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty. Her writing appears in the Stinging Fly, the Shore, Josephine Quarterly, and Meniscus Literary Journal, among others. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.
