CARGO
We released you today, sending you forth
in frosty vessels so lovingly made
in pans and milk carton molds.
A flotilla of ice boats embedded
with flowers from our gardens and filled
with a cargo of ash.
Six middle-aged women wading
into the Russian River, forming a circle,
for a recitation of poetry
to send you on your way.
I imagined you leisurely floating past
rock and redwoods, our flowers parting ways
with you as our boats melted, you slowly
disbursing into the current,
drifting by your house in Guerneville
then on to Duncans Mills where you’d wish
you could stop for a latté like we used to do
on our way to Goat Rock.
But you had other plans.
You sank to the bottom.
Freed yourself from our holds.
Relieved us of duty.
Our poem cut short,
icebergs bobbing in the water,
you hastened to the open sea
in a bloom of grey silt,
rushing
to that special place
where waters mingle,
fresh into salty.
SAVING SEEDS
My grandmother saved seeds,
spooning the slippery innards
of cantaloupes, cucumbers and tomatoes
into a strainer.
She rinsed some, fermented others
then placed them on paper to dry.
It’s how she guaranteed next year’s garden;
fed her family. She’d be shocked
at how we’ve transformed the earth
into a commodity; privatizing and modifying
seeds until they are no longer seeds
but intellectual properties.
How did we determine that seeds
could be patented and owned,
that our interconnectedness should be
through greed, not seed?
As a kid, Monsanto dazzled me at Disneyland
riding through the tunnel of inner space
in the Atommobile of Tomorrowland.
Everything seemed possible then.
Better living through chemicals
and master molecules. Turns out,
it’s all a lie. This mono-Monsanto culture
is starving us to death.
The honeybees were the first to know,
the first to go,
but can we be far behind?
If tomorrow is always built on today
like the voice in the tunnel said,
is it too late to save the seeds,
to save ourselves?
Copyright © 2023 Morgan Ray - All Rights Reserved.
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