I Know How to Grieve with the Dirt
When I was a child
I learned how to press
my ear to the ground
and listen as bombs
burned the rice paddies
my mother played in
as a girl, before war
tore her from them.
I became familiar
with that trembling
sensation, the way
that pain radiates
through the earth,
from one limb
to the rest of the body.
I followed the quivering
roots in the ground
to giant oaks and watched
as the trunks wept sap,
tears of mourning
for distant, dead cousins.
Palmyras, olives, acacias,
pines – thousands of trees
all split apart and charred
by missiles and machine guns.
I did not know, then,
in adulthood I would still
be lying underneath oaks
and listening to the earth
shiver in pain, or weeping
to wet the aching ground
in saltwater and sap.
My entire life thus far
knowing war at a distance –
to be under steady oaks
yet still shivering
when rice paddies
are sundered apart.
Vanessa Vigneswaramoorthy (@vandoesthings) is an Illankai Tamil settler artist, writer, and researcher residing and working on Treaty 13 and 14 Territories. Her work has been featured in Living Hyphen, NO NIIN Magazine, and Porter House Review. Vanessa’s writing explores themes of Tamil diaspora, BIPOC solidarity, and community care, delving into the intricate ways migration, identity, and intergenerational trauma shape both personal and collective experiences.
“I Know How to Grieve with the Dirt” explores Vigneswaramoorthy’s feelings of being from a war-affected community and seeing the continuation of violence through war and genocide through 2023 and 2024, and the interconnectedness of our pain. So much of this suffering is for want of land and resources, and at the same time people resist and fight out of love for their ancestral lands. It’s about how nature grieves with us, holds the remnants of our pain and suffering long after we are gone. A poem about being part of a war-affected community and seeing the violence of war inflicted on other communities, and understanding the way that nature mourns with us when we experience that violence.