Rick Benjamin. 10 November 2010. Harvesting Hope Breakfast, Southside Community Land Trust, on the occasion of their 30th Year.
Land Trust
In Los Angeles, 53 miles
of river running through
a city looks like cement
the actor-governor rode
his Harley down headed
for termination. A no-place
for tagging, trash, for riding
our own hog-like bikes through.
The history of my home city is
stealing water from Owens
River Valley, to the east, killing
all the flora & fauna & people
living there to manage that
feat, foreclosing water jumping
Its banks with hundreds
& thousands of tons of concrete.
In such a place, in the seventies,
Central Valley’s latest pickings
were also called canned fruit
& vegetables & moms & a few
dads used them in jellos or
on plates bright orange
from Kraft made more food-
groupy with the help of canned
tuna & peas in their neat,
separate tins.
Boys like me
wondered why fresh peaches
did not taste
like that sweet syrup Del Monte
had already delivered. Bartletts
felt hard on our teeth
longing for the sugared,
sogginess we knew as
pear. It was the era
of TV-dinners, the place
where malls were invented,
where I fell once out
of a tree I did not know
the name of that
also did not
belong there.
Non-
Indigenous eucalyptus fueling every other fire, forgetting
again lessons of dryness, of drought, & Santa Ana
wind like a hot breath blowing sagebrush to spark
every summer so that smog as we knew it was
less about cars & more about smoke & ash so
thick lungs hurt too much to shout or sing about it.
In such a place people drive out to Mojave & uproot
Cacti for their yards, bring home tortoises & lizards
& call them pets, populate avocado groves out
of existence, water lawns as if resources really were
inexhaustible.
It was a place where, one day,
us city kids were bussed out
to a working farm to have more direct
interactions & I saw a chicken’s head
cut off which made the idea of any such
relationship hard.
In such a place
bare feet know
asphalt best,
Fall means one hot
season dropping
into another, & figs
were not sacred at all.
But from these of course
I know also of Providence,
how places can be about
care, about destiny,
sanctuaries you & others
might escape or repair to,
like the verb: to restore,
to make, sometimes,
out of parking lots, city
farms, the mystical charms
of many cultures doing what comes
naturally to them, not just farm
fresh but medicinal, healing herbs
doing what plants do when you refrain
from harm.
To farm fallow fields we call
abandoned lots is a sacred trust
communities call for, from their own homes,
in Laos, Cambodia, Liberia, Puerto Rico &
the South side & from their adopted ones, urban
edges where we weed rows as part of the service
when some folks get married.
In a market today
in Istanbul someone is shellacking a fig to prepare it
for sale while someone else is picking it fresh
from the tree & lifting it toward some tortoise’s mouth.
Who belongs there. Who claims this desert as home.
who comes from a city where friends of the river
Are slamming their thousand sledge-hammers down,
chipping away at city-planners’ cement, wanting
rivers to flow, for their garden plots to feed
families in a city. Who trust in seeding &
repair & restoration & community gathering &
canning for this slow-growth, slow-food harvest.
Not pushing away from the table. Not pushing
anything away. In his home-, in her adopted-
city. A block at a time. The roof:
a garden over their heads; finding dinner
on our knees, our hands in the dirt of this high
roof-top of a city. Like an offering from the sky
in every breaking fast. Like 30 years of some
delicious thing landing, lightly, on your plate.
