Wild Oats and Fireweed

I dream of you,
I dream of you jumping,
Rabbit, jackrabbit, and quail.

A foolish daughter of immigrants,
prodigal, hybrid,
I was promiscuous.

The weed beside the road
casts its seed wide.

It furthers to cross the great water .

Old, I am only
this dirt, returning
to this ground,
a sharecropper.
O my America! my new-found-land!

The wild oats,
even, are foreign.

Weed and worthless foolsgold of the hills
of my childhood, my California,
let me be worthy
the stone:   the pollen:
the word spoken where the water rises:
the four colors of earth.
Let me in life hold
and pass before dying
the pouch of the silent things
of the six directions.
Let me dream
let me dream of you jumping,
rabbit, jackrabbit, and quail.

The red weed by roadsides
flowers, in clearcuts and burns
and the wastes of St Helens,
a tall, feathered dancer,
casting its ash-seeds.

O my America!
From the north ice, the raven's,
through the coyote-colored lands
and the Sun's heights and empires
to the south ice, the fireland,
they stand, the Rockies, Andes, vertebrae,
backbone of the black vulture
nailed to the barnside,
the vermin, the varmint.

My body is nail
and condor.
My breath is bullet
and feather.

I return, I turn, I turn in place.
I am my inheritance.

On the edge of the mountain a cloud hangs
and my heart
my heart
my heart hangs with it.

Late I have learned the last direction.
May I before death
learn some words of my language.


"Wild Oats and Fireweed" is from Wild Oats and Fireweed,
Harper, 1988, ©1988 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared
in Open Places , #33, Spring 1982.