Grains
Jewli will go home
when the maize
is ready to harvest
to burn burn
he will burn it all on hot coal
each corn is a grandmother
searching the soil to scratch
a hole with the heel of her foot
feed the soil two kernels of corn
their heels a golden shovel
always in conversation with all
the backbones of all who is us
to bring nights when their children
& their children will sit around
fires adorned with
charred gold pinched in salt
teeth digging into the stars
of good fortune
It often happens: we think deeply about our older relatives, our grandparents and maybe great-grandparents, only when it’s too late to talk with them and learn from their long memories. For the poets of African heritage published in the anthology Before Them, We the recovery of inter-generational memories can be the discovery of a self. It’s a theme underlying this week’s poemby Esther Kondo, a Kenyan-German writer, poet and experimental film-maker.
Family relationship isn’t necessary for the handing-down of ancestral treasure, a seeming paradox that Kondo’s poem delights in. The poet explains in their introduction, “I remember visiting a grandmother once. I say a grandmother because she was not my grandmother but she was a grandmother and I called her grandmother. She … did not speak much to me but showed me things. How to dig holes using my heel to plant maize; how to wash my feet before going to bed. When I heard her speak it was under a sky showered in stars.” Kondo goes on to describe sitting by the fire with the grandmother, watching her hands make words, and learning from her eyes “how to hold fire and not burn but instead carry”. This introduction is a lyric essay with the power of a poem. Grains, built from unpunctuated lines arranged as tercets, drops the narrative “I” to present a series of vivid pictures where images, juxtaposed, transcend spatial boundaries, and actions, set in the future, transcend time.
In the poem’s alchemy, the corn-cob and grandmother seem to combine in a Ceres-like figure “searching the soil to scratch / a hole with the heel of her foot”. The corn-dolly and corn-mother are old harvest-traditions, originally thought to provide lodging for the homeless spirit of the corn. The “corn grandmother” in the poem isn’t just a person, but a place where the poet can find refuge and inspiration. Poetry itself enters into the legacy when the bare heels treading the corn into the soil become “a golden shovel”.
The term originates in a seminal poem by Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), frequently known as We Real Cool, though its full title is THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL. A younger African American poet Terrance Hayes founded a new form when he wrote a poem, The Golden Shovel, each of whose lines took their end-word from Brooks’s poem. Published in his collection Lighthead, Hayes’ act of cross-generational homage and political dialogue inspired a whole anthology, first published in 2019. One of the anthology’s editors, Peter Kahn, explains the technique, and includes an extract from Terrance Hayes’s account of his own Golden Shovel process on the Young Poets’ Network here. The Golden Shovel, the name of a pool hall in Brooks’s poem and associated with deprivation and exclusion, now also symbolises the creative wealth generated by Black inheritance.
Kondo’s reference in the poem is bold and nicely judged. The words, planted like grain, reproduce and become the family “always in conversation with all / the backbones of all who is us”. The singular/plural melding (“all who is us”) and the repetition of “al/all” suggests the proud absorption of the individual into the collective, and how it enables the acquisition of “backbone” in the figurative, moral sense.
Grains opens with possibly an earlier childhood memory, when “Jewli” brings in the harvested maize to be cooked on hot coal before it’s eaten. Kondo explains, “maize is a popular food that you can buy from street vendors in Kenya. I use the word burned because that is the method of preparation. It is similar to grilling but we refer to it as burning.” Jewli’s naming gives him an immediate, homely familiarity and points up the contrast with the unnamed grandmother who will appear later in her more transcendental sphere.
Grains concludes with a joyous super-feast for the progeny of the corn-grandmothers, “their children/ & their children” who will “sit around / fires adorned with // charred gold pinched in salt”. You can taste that “charred gold” corn, the smoky-sweet flavour sharpened by a pinch of salt and, perhaps, the pinch of hunger. The golden shovels of healthy heels and roots have done their work, and now it’s the teeth that take over, as they must when you eat corn-on-the-cob, “digging into” the chewy kernels that are finally transformed into “the stars / of good fortune”. And it has all sprung from such a small local action – the heel making the hole in the soil, the child learning the simple, vital process from an adult and, in the final act of alchemy, growing it into words, into a poem.
