How the Land Was Lost to Us
New York, NY
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Here’s how the land slipped through our hands: carved, crossed, and finally paved – yet still aching to be known again.
I. Colonization
They arrived speaking conquest –
language drawn like blade through soil,
naming rivers they’d never knelt beside,
etching borders into the flesh of land
without listening to the pulse of every tree.
To them, silence was vacancy, not reverence.
They measured the region by what it could yield,
never by the stories braided into bark,
or the prayers folded into the quiet throat of night sky.
They did not steal our homeland.
They dismantled the covenant –
took the offering bowl and called it myth,
the sacred grove and called it wilderness.
They watched us bow to the wind and called us primitive,
not seeing how we waited for the moon to tilt her silver head,
for the dirt to loosen its tongue before we laid seed.
They taught us to fear what we once offered fruit to.
They took fire, but not the ritual that made it sacred.
Took water, but not the stillness in its summoning.
Brought God bound in leather, and buried ours
beneath the ash of what they renamed progress.
But still, somewhere, beneath roots they never learned to name,
a memory hummed. Low, steady, waiting –
for someone to kneel
not in possession, but in kinship.
II. Migration
We did not leave the land – we were exhaled by it.
Pushed toward borders that could not translate
the softness in our rites,
the weight of names that carried both grief and prayer.
My grandmother wrapped seeds in the lining of her suitcase
not for eating, but for remembering.
But memory does not take root in cold places
where wind cuts in unfamiliar tones
and the soil does not smell like home.
She once could pluck comfort from a garden
with nothing but her fingertips
a whisper, a hum, and the body would listen.
But distance dries the memory; the names blur at her lips
she speaks, but the land no longer listens.
We learned to make do, to call foreign herbs by ancestral names,
to plant when the calendar told us to, not the turn of the moon.
We remembered the shape of what once was,
but forgot how it felt in our hands.
In this country, the seasons change on cue,
but nothing moves with meaning.
We watch the sun rise without knowing whether it’s for us
as if the land itself recognizes our presence
but refuses to call it belonging.
III. Modernization
We live in cities where light spills from glass mouths, but never from stars.
Where trees are trimmed into obedience
and flowers bloom behind tempered glass,
rootless and under surveillance.
Here, concrete replaces memory, steel replaces prayer.
We measure wealth by how sterile we’ve made our survival,
by how clean we keep our hands,
even as the world burns around us.
The city hums like a machine powered with absence
its arteries paved in haste, its lungs made of smoke.
It speaks in gridlines, in cold syllables of commerce,
in the hiss of systems designed to silence what once grew wild.
We are told this is evolution,
to eat fruit that never felt a hand in the soil.
We call this growth, though nothing rooted survives it.
I scroll past fire. Acres of it. While sipping something called all natural.
I say “climate change.” But forget to say corporate greed.
I say “loss,” but mean we gave it away.
And still, on some nights,
I step outside and feel a tremble beneath the sidewalk,
as if the earth is speaking in a language I was meant to recognize.
And without knowing why, I kneel.
Press my fingers to the cracks
to the wounds I am only beginning to understand were always inherited.
Reflection
This poem began with a question: how did we become so distant from the land that once sustained us - physically, emotionally, and spiritually? As I explored the contest theme, Connections to Nature: Looking Inside, Going Outside, I was drawn to the idea that our relationship with nature has been slowly severed over time - first by colonization, then by migration, and finally by modern life. My inspiration also came from generational knowledge; what was passed down and what was lost. My ancestors once lived in symbiosis with the earth, knowing when to plant by the moon’s rhythm, how to read the winds before rain, and how to use herbs for healing. But that kind of knowing has long been eroded by displacement and industrialization. My poem traces this unraveling, and imagines what it might mean to begin remembering. I hope readers feel the quiet urgency in the poem; the ache to reconnect, to kneel not in possession, but in kinship. My message is simple: we are not separate from nature. We are a part of it, and it remembers us - even when we forget.