Lauren Oya Olamina Explains Earthseed to Ernest Hemingway
Searching for metaphor, you named yourself Papa & modernized
God. You too felt far too much for far too many, reshaped Him?
(Her? It? Them?) in your own image, understood God’s mute-
Ability to hasten or lull as We divine. We read your pleas
As We heard your walls crumbling. Both born in this month
Our nation marks its birth, We’ve always seized on ironies
In lies We’ve exposed for centuries, always heard chasms
Calling you into a mirror refraction of a future where
Our flesh is a sieve We sift, shift, gild, & levitate. You
Don’t see the humanity of We: neither human only
Nor things you can fillip like lint or mucus or any dandelion
There ever was. No, We feast on all you take for granted:
Sun, phosphorus, CO2, prayer. Watered or not, your waste
Alights. We know how reckless you can be, so We find
Caterpillars for pruning, mugwort, red
Clover, firethorn for compost & company. Tassel hyacinth,
Bulbous buttercup, & oleander throw shade, & We live
To breathe April’s musk another day, love them back
By shaking loose miners aiming to lay their larvae, plotting
To devour every leaf We release. Last autumn’s frost,
Thick as your indifference, almost made giving up on
Christmas snow an inevitability, but November’s tempests
Thawed us enough for the naked lady orchid to shimmy
Loose O horizon’s hunger for any ol’ wet & slick heat,
Deepening the roots of We. A son for a daughter, a tattered
Flag’s ragtime softshoe these lines will never do. This is no
Exotic view, this land our home too. We’ve never felt
More Black & American, rhapsodic outbursts of brilliance
Coloring every damned spot We shadow, the unhinged quiet
Of the reverie of We in repose.
Copyright © 2025 by L. Lamar Wilson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 28, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Processing many beloveds’ transition[s] to ancestor[s] this past decade, I has become We, and watching Octavia Butler’s prophecies in Parable of the Sower unfold, We cling to her hyper-empathic protagonist’s post-apocalyptic philosophy for ethical world-(re)building, especially as men barrel roughshod toward retrenchment into antediluvian paternalism, valorized in the twentieth-century persona and art of one of its bastions, who died at his own hands, an inevitable fate for them, too. Yet, as those in touch with the Black feminine within always do, We’ll make a way outta no way, remembering love, enigmatic yet kaleidoscopic, never dies. Say less. Let’s go.”
—L. Lamar Wilson