Gratitude: The Soil and the Specter, Land as Witness

Gratitude: The Soil and the Specter, Land as Witness

The soil remembers what we forget.
Each furrow is a ledger,
each seed a testimony.
Plowed rows are not neutral,
they are scars from treaties broken,
bones ground into fertilizer,
land titles signed in the ink of conquest.

The canal is no mere ditch.
It is a vein cut into Tonantzin’s skin,
blood redirected,
flow harnessed for agribusiness kings.
But listen:
when the tractors rest,
the water whispers.
It carries fragments of Nahuatl prayers,
the syllables of rivers that once flowed free.

Cornfields bend in silence,
but beneath their stillness,
an insurgent root system spreads.
Each stalk a survivor,
each husk a hidden scripture.
When Quetzalcoatl followed the ants into the mountain,
it was not just to find maize,
it was to teach us:
the smallest creatures know the path to survival,
the soil keeps the secrets
until the hungry are ready to listen.

And the specters rise.
The ghosts step out from the irrigation mist,
faces weathered by decades in the sun.
Braceros, zoot suiters, deportees,
they speak in chorus:
“the land was never empty,
the land was never silent,
the land was never yours to own.”