Seed Prayer

Facing uphill we kneel in the early grass,
as if praying to the house above,
but it’s the January rain and this soil
living and soft after years of drought
we worship. Our hands begin
to pull and small spades cut
as we balance against steepness,
carving a rectangle, more or less,
twenty by ten across the hill
between live oak and redwood saplings,
freeing the space of thistle and foxtail,
sparing the yarrow and poppies beginning
to unfurl. Santa Cruz mudstone ticks
against our blades, reminding us
of ocean bottom far behind
the seventies tract homes on the ridge
above, the sheep for a century
shearing earth away, the oak forest
before that and the people who gathered
acorns here each fall. We’re here
to scatter a half pound of native seed,
lupine and poppy, clarkias, gilias,
tidy tips, phlox. Set out these pioneers,
old timers, make them a ledge
with tree-farmed pine studs
scavenged from a pallet to keep
the soil a few years, help them take hold,
hope they conquer invasive grasses,
wild radish, survive native gophers
and scatter their children
through rhizome and seed
across the hillside to feed insects,
hummingbirds, and up the chain.
We promise to return, pull weeds, water
as long as our legs let us clamber
the steep hillside spared, probably,
only because contractors couldn’t convince
the city to let them build out the slope.
This is the way we know how to pray,
two sets of hands that love one another,
two beings of an invasive species
trying to make right a small patch
of land for the moment in our name.
We hope our little rectangle of flowering joy,
its colored patterns, will feed imagination
of neighbors above to mimic us,
and the colored lights dazzling in ranges
we cannot see will summon butterfly and bee.
Every dhamma, every conditioned thing,
dependent on interbeing, down
to our need for color and scent
swirling in winds blowing up the canyon
across Mission from the Pacific.
A small prayer, our hands, a small strength
scattering power not ours of the making,
faith in a seed, simply of our giving.