The Tejano Considers Seeds

To flower from seeds,
to make roots from water
means there’s a tending

or soft beginning like tenderness.
Delicate young germination

from soil. My baby. My soil as a noun.
A piece of ground from the Old French for sol.
A native lightness. The sol rises in Texas too.

Rising like a verb, there’s no stillness
to the threshold—another word for the bottom of a door,
meaning there’s a sill soiled. A sill or cut timber. Laid
& crossed over. To soil a verb meaning

there is original sin, meaning before dirt
there was cleanliness. No entry, no violation

of God. A mess of seeds that needs
water. Give us a mess of thick mud. 

            Que chiquero.             Standing still like a cleansing
after a gentle roll-around. Wallowing in a field

como un puerco. Madrugando            con hambre—
I am your shepherd. I am ready for battle

with the pastured sky
you fought so hard against

Copyright © 2022 by Sebastián H. Páramo. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 23, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“This poem came from a workshop where we were given a prompt to use the Oxford English Dictionary to create a poem that interrogated the etymology of words. I knew other poems that did this, so I welcomed the opportunity to experiment with the prompt for my current work-in-progress set in Texas. This poem gave me an opportunity to examine those themes: place, language, and history. The ending of the poem gave me a struggle for some time until I followed the language and landed on something that surprised me.”
—Sebastián H. Páramo