Seed
Seed: incarnate memory, helix dance
always of some kind of love (root
for water, leaf for sun, flower for
gold-robed drunk-on-pollen bee),
parents in pieces breaking, undone,
mended into child: generations: ages:
Hordeum vulgare, wild barley, bristly,
eleven thousand years with us,
fragile boat of time: each infant kernel coded
by its mother plant with the hour of life’s return,
precise temperature of resurrection
at which it must wake:
and so we took the most beautiful
to honor with immortality
and tore their flesh limb from limb
and cast their blood and bodies
into our new-sown fields:
Take, eat …
Isn’t every god a god of grain?
Isn’t every sacrament beer and bread?
B.J. Buckley is an award-winning Montana poet and writer. Her latest book is Corvidae: Poems of Ravens, Crows, and Magpies (Lummox Press 2014). Read more.