Let Me Begin Again
by Major Jackson
Let me begin again as a quiet thought
in the shape of a shell slowly examined
by a brown child on a beach at dawn
straining to see their future. Let me begin
this time knowing the drumming in my dreams
is me inheriting the earth, is morning
lighting up the rivers. Let me burn
my vanities: old music in the pines, sifters
of scotch, a day moon like a signature
of night. This time, let me circle
the island of my fears only once then
live like a raging waterfall and grow
a magnificent mustache. Let me not ever be
the birdcage or the serrated blade or
the empty season. Dear Glacier, Dear Sea
of Stars, Dear Leopards disintegrating
at the outer limits of our greed; soon we will
encounter you only in motivational tweets.
Reader, I should have married you sooner.
This time, let me not sleep like the prophet who
believes he’s seen infinity. Let me run
at break-neck speeds toward sceneries
of doubt. I have no more dress rehearsals
to attend. Look closer: I am licking my lips.
***
I have nightmares about knotweed. In my dreams, our trampling on soil above roots awakens a slumbering giant. The knotweed rises slowly, aware of but untroubled by our presence–its will to live is strong and it does not fear us. It silently commands its roots to grow. We dig and pull and cut what we can out of the earth, but our aggressive removal only further provokes the giant. The roots grow faster, visibly tunneling through the dirt, traveling ten, twenty, thirty feet, deftly navigating rocks, tree roots, and other underground obstacles. Shoots push out of the soil along the way to harness energy from the sun. It colonizes the nearby clover field, grows up through the asphalt parking lot, and travels under the road to crumble newly installed concrete sidewalks on the opposite side of the street. It continues to grow even from small fragments we leave behind. We can’t work fast enough to contain its destructive spread and end up standing in a forest of knotweed stretching as far as the eye can see. We drop our tools and stare around us in bewildered defeat.
I wish I could place my knotweed nightmares solidly in the realm of fantasy. These things could actually happen though, and it is enough to paralyze me in my waking hours. Maybe it was a mistake to have begun digging, I think. Maybe I will just tiptoe around the knotweed and hope against hope that it doesn’t spread. I’ve already angered it, I’m sure, but maybe if I stop looking at it directly, it will simply disappear. It’s a holdover strategy from my childhood: If I stay small and quiet, I will be safe. If I stay still and move slowly, I won’t stir up anything painful and bad.
I breathe deeply. It’s the best medicine for moving through the paralysis. As I breathe, I am transported back in time to a classroom where I watched slides showing what white colonizers in the thrall of commerce and industrial ideas of progress did to our watershed. Land was cut to connect water from inland to sound. A big lake dropped 9 feet with the final cut. Wetlands drained. A river lost connection to the lake. The receding waters trapped salmon returning home to spawn. The river dried up. The watershed nature gave us was irrevocably changed.
“That was quite a day for the white people at least,” Joseph Moses of the Duwamish said. “The waters just went down, down, until our landing and canoes stood dry and there was no Black River at all. There were pools, of course, and the struggling fish trapped in them. People came from miles around, laughing and hollering and stuffing fish into gunny sacks.” Henry Moses, Duwamish, dragged his canoe out of the mud and said he never wanted to paddle it again.
By 1920, our tinkering with a watershed of over 2,000 square miles had shrunk it to fewer than 500. Enormous ships and industry forcibly displaced the Duwamish from their homeland. Because of the miracle they are, coho and chinook salmon managed find their way through the changed watershed to their natal home in the Cedar River, though the hardships these changes wrought have helped bring those chinook to the brink of extinction. We may still lose them.
I feel the same burning anger I experienced when I learned all this for the first time. The link between what we did then and the climate and extinction crisis we are living through now becomes newly immediate. It took more or less a hundred years to get into this mess, I remind myself. It will take us time to get ourselves out. I’m not sure if we can, but I do know I get to orient my actions around different values–wholeness, harmony, balance, justice, diversity, equity, inclusion. I get to be an active participant in healing myself, in healing the land, in healing everything I can. Staying small helps no one. So I transmute the anger into determination, stubborn persistence, and dedication to a project that many would say is destined to fail. I will not look away from the knotweed. I will stare it down today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, for years and years and years.
Every day I will begin again.
