Nixta Red

 It takes the energy of the sun and makes building blocks from it.

Without soil and water it can't function, but the weight comes from light.

It give me breath while blooming into form.

Flower becomes fruit only from the flow of the wind sizzling through flower and husk.

It forms carbon Lego blocks in rows, sometimes parallel, sometimes spiral.

Blue, red, yellow or white it stacks cubes of synthesized sunlight into a cylinder wrapped in a rough paper husk.

Too much water and it rots, too little and it shrivels.

It partners with ancient biology in the soil, exchanging sugars for distant and difficult nutrients.

Fusing light, water, wind and soil, it reaches to the sky as if meant to feed the Heavens.

We leave it to dry up there in the sky, finally pulling back the layers to reveal our prize.

We store it away somewhere dry for a needy tomorrow.

It contains ancient starlight and sunrays, winds of distant lands, the soil of my place and every cycle of water since the beginning of time.

I place it into a pot of boiling water with a spoon of my best copy of wood ash.

It lights up the room with the aroma of time and place. Imbuing the house with Earthy aromas and moist air filled with the tears I have shed into my garden. I feel this place and time enter my nostrils and disperse into my bloodstream. I recall the time I have spent and feel the time people have spent this year and for hundreds of years, to bring this kernel to my foreign place of domestication.

I feel time in the nixtamalized corn as I feel with no other food. Perhaps those little antennas pointing to the stars every night put a little star dust into the kernel and the elements I call me call to their long displaced brethren.

The Earth wants to express something through me and I often find myself searching for it like a problem-seeking missile wanting to blast from my path any potential detour-inducing objects. But as I smell and then ingest the corn I have grown, dried, nixtamalized and cooked I find myself as a simple conduit again. I find myself absorbing the wind, water, soil and sun only to return those elements back. I am but flesh wrapped around a passageway for recycling elements and nutrients for the next generation. Like a plant, I find my existence a regenerative part of an ancient cycle.

As the smell of corn and campo slowly dissipates over the next day I find myself drawn back to the spring planting and summer harvest, warmed by the thought of the coming seasons. I have been grounded by the corn while also exited for the future. It is a kernel of truth, the fruit of my labor and a seed of connection.

Here's to the love of corn.