Cambridge Forum explores some indigenous thinking mixed with a little magic, talking to Jess Housty about her debut poetry collection, CRUSHED WILD MINT.
Jess Housty is a Haíɫzaqv parent, writer, and land-based educator from the community of Bella Bella, BC. Housty lives in unceded ancestral homelands where she works in community building, food sovereignty, and leadership development. She is a freelance contributor to The Tyee and in addition to her debut poetry collection from Nightwood Editions, she has a forthcoming collection of essays due out shortly from Magic Canoe Press.
Housty’s writing is enmeshed in her indigenous roots and values, “wealth is measured not by what you’ve accumulated but by what you give away. True abundance comes from community and turning a gift into more gifts”. She demonstrates this beautifully in “Sixty-Eight Plums”, a surprise bag of plums appears on her doorstep and provides an opportunity for her to carry the joy forward by making jars of plum jam, to leave at neighbors’ doors.
Sixty-Eight Plums (by Jess Housty)
When sixty-eight golden plums appear like a bowl of phosphorescence on your stoop, look both upward
and all around you
when you give a little thanks.
It is no small feat
that they have arrived here:
Someone planted trees,
smiling to themselves at the foolishness of growing plums in this climate
where the rain makes everything soft— makes everyone soft.
And for more than one hundred years the trees have probably not been tended but certainly been spared the axe
and the lightning and unhappy accidents, and survived to delight you.
And this week, this week of softening
and relentless rain, someone lifted their hand level with their heart or higher—
sixty-eight times to the branches
while shaking the weather
out of their hair—
and doing this, they thought of you.
So plunge your clean hands in the bowl (What else is there to do?)
and pick out the stems and leaves;
tear into the rain-soft flesh,
the sun-bright flesh, to pry out the pits;
and think of how you will carry forward joy when you leave jars of warm jam
on many doorsteps in the morning.
