I Know How to the Grieve with the Dirt

by Vanessa Vigneswaramoorthy

When I was a child

I learned how to press

my ear to the ground

and listen as bombs

burned the rice paddies

my mother played in

as a girl, before war

tore her from them.

I became familiar

with that trembling

sensation, the way

that pain radiates

through the earth,

from one limb

to the rest of the body.

I followed the quivering

roots in the ground

to giant oaks and watched

as the trunks wept sap,

tears of mourning

for distant, dead cousins.

Palmyras, olives, acacias,

pines – thousands of trees

all split apart and charred

by missiles and machine guns.

I did not know, then,

in adulthood I would still

be lying underneath oaks

and listening to the earth

shiver in pain, or weeping

to wet the aching ground

in saltwater and sap.

My entire life thus far

knowing war at a distance –

to be under steady oaks

yet still shivering

when rice paddies

are sundered apart.