TRANSCRIPT

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

The drive between my parents’ and grandparents’ houses took us by 18th and Glenwood in North Philadelphia. The neighborhood was defined by its dumped trash — old mattresses, broken furniture, pyramids of garbage bags along a street full of vacant lots. The stretch was an eyesore — until residents in the rowhouses across the street, many of them with roots in the American South, took action. 

Neighbors teamed up to clear the debris and junk, razed the land, and set up garden plots. They created a community garden. They grew okra, squash, peaches, figs, and just about any other vegetable you can think of. That transformation was important to me. It served as a visible metaphor for the possibility of positive change. As a green space, the garden reduced people’s senses of fear; it eradicated the feeling of dereliction and helped to lessen crime. 

Today, Glenwood Green Acres is one of the oldest community gardens in the city. Food grown on its four acres supplies local food banks. If you go online, you’ll encounter pictures of mouth-watering pomegranates and green beans as well as smiling gardeners celebrating Earth Day. 

Today’s formally rich poem positions gardening as a powerful means of holding on to one’s culture, to one’s culinary identity in a new land. 

Refuge
by Nehassaiu deGannes

Dear disappeared town, the flowers 
at my window remind someone of you. Say
“petunias.” Hear Betunia—town of his father’s birth.
Mornings, my man leaps from my bed to brew mint-
cardamom tea. Hear sea. Dear B, his father’s
found a way to grow fig-trees in Newark, NJ.
In winter, you are safe, burlap-cocooned,
a smuggled-secret in his garage.
No hungry warblers.  No sudden frosts. 
Nor the Atlantic weight that can slow.

Nor the Atlantic weight that slows 
an eighty-year old Palestinian man walking
through Manhattan in search of olive oil.
He scours bright shelves of the city.  Home
is a map salvaged purely from memory
and the beveled light in his hands.
Olive oil as smoke.  Olive oil as wine. 
Olive oil as desert mosque. Which orchard.
Which school. Which mother.  Which son.
Dear son, come summer, he will lift.

Dear sun, come summer, he will lift
the trees and place them under your ardor, 
darning that lost farm with this cramped
garden, for there’s only one celestial arbor
we all live under.  He will become master-
seamstress, desert bee, oh, pollinating one.
For here lies his secret to the ripening of figs
in Newark, NJ: Prick each fig, every one,
with a needle, dipped in olive-oil.
A man crows, brings me tea and smoke.

My man crows, brings me tea and smoke-
purple fruit from the chain-link garden.
I graze each coppery plum. Say “home.”
Hear Chile, Brazil, Iceland and Jordan.
Seek the invisible navel.  The mouth
is a bulldozer? No, our smoke-velvet lips
warble “witness,” join in the map-maker’s prayer:
This orchard. This school. This mother. This son.
This fig.  This room. No one can say gone is gone. 
Not the disappeared town, not the flowers.

“Refuge” by Nehassaiu deGannes from MUSIC FOR EXILE © 2021 Nehassaiu deGannes. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Tupelo Press.