The Corn Poem
          For Tony

By Jarita Davis

Tony is big. If he weren’t Cape Verdean, he’d be
from Kansas. “You should write a poem
about corn,” he tells me now. “A piece of corn,
talking to a man in Cabo Verde who plants it.”

When Tony was a boy, his father’s
dim rustling in the kitchen shook him
awake each morning, and from his bedroom
window, he watched a silhouette slipping
from home, rushing to meet the sun
in a field of corn that would not grow.

Every year, you plant me in this hole
in the dirt and wait for rain. Maybe
there’s enough rain, or maybe it doesn’t rain
for two years. Or three. But still you plant, why?

His father left his frustrations in farming
for America, and Tony grew strong
eating the dried corn his father used to press
into dirt, while other boys’ fathers still
crouched in their plots of land, ignoring
quiet complaints and insults from corn.

Why are you so stupid to plant me
in this hole in the dirt? You could
make some cous cous or nice manchupa to eat.

Tony’s father returned to Cabo Verde,
to hold the dry kernels in his palm and
feel them stirring for growth. He bought more
land with American money, and hired men to put
pieces of corn in dirt and wait for rain.

“Write something like that,” Tony tells me,
resting an enormous hand on each knee.
“A piece of corn talking. But the man
plants it anyhow. That would be a good poem.”

And maybe it would. But in all
my revisions, the corn kernel wants
to crack through its own hard yellow skin
and stretch its green reach to meet the sun.

Copyright © Jarita Davis. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author

Jarita Davis earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. She has been the Featured Emerging Writer at the Tom Dent Literary Festival in New Orleans and the writer in residence at the Nantucket Historical Association. She has received fellowships from the Mellon Mayes program, Cave Canem, and Hedgebrook and was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Travel Research Grant to complete her collection of poems, There Should Be More Water. Her work has appeared in the Southwestern Review, Historic Nantucket, and Crab Orchard Review. Presently, Jarita Davis lives and writes in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Copyright © 1997-2006 by Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

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