GRANT HIER

Untended Garden (excerpts)      

These are not just faceless tales of a sacred tree or a sister who walked the river before me. These are echoes of the common, forgotten. The double helix tattoo spun from the first mother and echoed extant in every mother since. Alive in a mother named Bengta, alive in 1606, passed in eye glints to survive this evening in me, and that very blood, though mixed, carries the pulse to my wrists. All of them, all of it, here with me now. Remembered by name or not, I can sense them. The man whose voice resonated like mine seventy-seven generations back, who grieved his wife's death with the same choked sob that has left my throat tonight. The mother one hundred births back, who drew her child's face near to her own and whispered

I am honored to share this place
of shadows with you

in a tongue I could not know, yet carried what has become a part of my blood too, and all of their singing has brought me to this place, mingled into this, my essence, and yes — that same prayer to the spark that she offered her child still resonates in me, in deference, and back to all of them.

— excerpt from Untended Garden, Part iii, section 6

 

I imagine my blood line
thirteen generations back —

The woman whose eyes I share.
The man whose curve of hand
matches mine exact

as he reaches out
to cup her jaw line,
stretches his thumb across

to the other cheek
to stop the fear
before she can taste it.

Ancestors
migrating,
abandoning

soil known for generation
after generation as
home.

How far back does it run?
How far before the humming
can no longer reach through? .

. . . .

I press my hand to
the dry trunk of ash

close my eyes
until sleep threatens

trying to imagine
their faces

trying to follow the pulse of sap
all the way

back

to the taproot

— excerpt from Untended Garden, Part i, section 3

 

For more from Prize Americana WINNER Untended Garden,
visit the book online here.

 

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