Learning an Earth-Grown Language

Learning an Earth-grown language

                                                                                       after Camille Dungy

by Cadence Eischens

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One: Winter

It is pre-dawn, and the land is singing. Black Oak and Shagbark Hickory

drum basslines with their January pulses. Sandhill Cranes call dawn

to a canopy of fog from the sandbars of the Wisconsin River. Snow softens

the ssk, ssk of skis. Huff, haah. My warm lungs sing back

through the boughs of wintering pines. They give way to savanna  

and my skis sweep Monarda and Little Bluestem to Earth.  

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In this remnant winter, I am quiet on the hill. Over the grumble of the freeway  

and the clamor of our urgent world, I am listening.

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Two: Summer

What can a prairie teach us about kinship? In June,

I arrive to this place with the whole world freshly handed to me,  

its perennial horrors and incessant pleas for my generation

to fix things, make something from humanity’s scorched earth

wrongdoings. In this acrid overwhelm is where I meet  

my prairie. Goldenrod and Ariana, Echinacea and Sophie,  

Milkweed and Catherine, Spiderwort and Lily. New siblings,  

each blossoming with a brilliance so revitalizing, it sets me on my feet.

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They are who first teach me to breathe slowly. To go forth diligently  

with the patience of native bees, doing what small work we can  

with honesty, humility. We accept our responsibility in disrupting the landscape,  

sawing Glossy Buckthorn and torching desiccated Dropseed. We learn to live  

that edict older, even, than the Leopold ethic – to be part of the land-community.

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Three: Autumn

What can a river teach us about time? Sliding seaward on a warm November evening,

she tells us transience is the wisdom of a river-body. Her spring floods carry  

invasive Reed Canary seed, her summer current shapes new maps with sand  

and tannin stains, her autumn water rinses burn scars away, and winter  

is her breathing – freezing and opening.  

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On that sacred and singular evening, the backs of my sister’s knees  

braid the ancient stream. Water, from when the glaciers  

scoured the quartzite hills, and the river laid her bed  

in the Great Marsh. Water, from when the cranes and the Ho-Chunk  

lived on her banks; from when their land was razed; from when, resilient,  

they made their way back home. Water, that asks for a new word  

to be carved for the world - let it be wonder, the river says.  

I dip my hands into the current and watch the ripples change.

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Four: Spring

What can soil teach us about hope? The world around

us has always been fracturing. Four billion years  

of tectonic plates separating and converging. The glaciers built  

these sand counties, and over them people have written histories  

of savanna oak openings and wilderness mythologies. Of colonial farmsteads  

and Indigenous homecomings. The soil we stand on holds

the roots, bones and seeds of both empires and communities.  

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So I return to what is before me. I lay down in March’s ephemeral spring  

and imagine, for a quiet moment, I could save everything. My siblings  

join me. Bloodroot, and Chipping Sparrow, and human beings. Listening,  

we rest our bodies like palms against the face of the Earth. Our presence  

good disturbance, an indelible belonging – content  

with what we will create. We breathe together,  

all of us. Huff, haah. It is pre-dawn,  

and the land is singing.

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