Here in this salted, dried up world,
we trade power for power for
blood.
Plantation owners, emperors, the truest ancestors
of tech CEOs, they watched the sun
hang and fall, imagined it a slave
to the ruling season. They would never admit, they themselves
were slaves of the sun. Of their sleep.
Of just enough water. They coerced men wrapped
in but a few cloths and tragedies,
to break apart the soil and make it theirs.
And then we go on to say things
like this is a free country.
What have we inherited from this legacy
but their ideas of owning and trading the earth?
This soil here draped in fire, there sunk by tides, and far beyond our imaginary,
bringing forth life.
Even in a plant nursery
we call upon the breakers of the earth.
How dare you suggest you own
that strawberry tree?
Does palming a cashier a crumbled bill
make life transactional?
Does it make you the master of its
unborn fruit?
Does it make you somewhat less
a slave of the soil?
—
Farrah Hasan is a Bengali-American Ph.D. student. She is passionate about climate justice, poetry, and their intersections.
