The Dirt My Mother Gave Me
East Burke, VT
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
My mother’s hands were cracked earth,
splitting open at the knuckles,
seeping salt into the dirt she begged to stay fertile.
she taught me to knee before fields that would not feed us,
to pray louder when the rain did not come,
to love land even as it spat us out.
I was born with soil packed under my fingernails,
a baptism not of water but rot,
worms already writhing in the cracks between my baby teeth.
my lullabies were the creaking of dying trees,
the sob of rivers dammed and stripped bare.
She told me:
the land keeps score,
and you are already losing.
I grew up in the concrete mouth of a city
where gardens were caged in glass and wire,
where roots had to crack sidewalks open just to breathe.
I learned to find beauty in small rebellions,
a dandelion breaking through a sewer grate,
a vine strangling a crumbling brick wall,
a child planting seeds in a coffee cup.
The city paved over the bones of my ancestors,
layer after layer of asphalt,
but at night, I swear I can hear them under my feet,
humming like a fever,
aching for rain.
There is no clean dirt here.
only dust heavy with exhaust,
rivers choked with plastic veins.
I was through it anyway,
lungs raw, skin blistered, heart a cracked jar
of honey and blood,
still searching for something green enough to believe in.
I am built from fields and fumes,
feral gardens and rusted playgrounds,
the broken teeth of forests devoured for parking lots.
still something in me yearns for sunlight.
Some nights, I dream of clawing into the earth,
digging through generations of grief and smoke and destruction,
searching for a root that will not snap in my palms.
I wake up with dirt under my nails,
the taste of ash in my mouth,
and my mothers voice, stubborn and wind-torn:
make something out of it anyway.
So, I plant grief like a seed.
I water it with what little hope I have left.
I watch it split and bleed and grow.
I teach my children to kiss the earth even when it spits in their mouths.
I teach them:
you are the wild things.
you are the crack in the concrete.
you are the flood that will wash this tired sickness clean.
you are what the land has been waiting for.
and when they ask why the ground trembles beneath their feet,
I will say:
because the dead are dancing.
because the dirt remembers.
because you survived.
Reflection
This poem is a fusion of my own mother’s strength and the power of Mother Nature. My mother, who is my role model, embodies resilience in ways I've always admired, and I see her strength reflected in the earth. So, the cracked earth in the poem represents not only my mother but also Mother Nature herself. As I've grown, I've come to feel a soul-tie to both, inheriting the scars and strength of the land, just as my mother passed on her own resilience to me. The poem reflects on how grief and survival are intertwined with nature, where even destruction can lead to growth. Through the theme "Connections to Nature: Looking Inside, Going Outside," I realized how deeply our inner worlds are shaped by the natural world around us, how we are connected to the earth in ways we might not fully understand. My message to readers is simple: even in moments of destruction, there is always room for growth. The dirt remembers, and so do we.