Silverberry

by Gary Phillips

Every year I watch with sadness my neighbor hacking at you below his house, flailing with ax
and shovel and curses. One of the most powerful landowners in our state has vowed to kill
Elaeagnus wherever it abides on his land, which is difficult; you must be hacked to the ground
by cheap labor and then poisoned at the roots.

The land carries this grief for years, the amphibians diminish, and still you return.
But I know your names and actions from other ancient places. Try them on my tongue, slowly,
like a prayer: Elaeagnus, oleaster, senjed, oil-tree, goat nipple, wild olive, Angel of Khordad,
Trebizond date, Angel of Attachment.

You have been collected for food and medicine in Palestine and Israel for thousands of years, but
in Iran you are held as the goddess of spring, your yellow creamy flowers an inspiration to find
springs and bathe in them, to welcome new life, renewal, continuance.

I see you celebrated by millions during the Feast of Nowruz, on the day the sun crosses the
celestial equator. Your dried berries a necessary portion on every plate, reminding the world of
filial love, marking the day that the universe first started its motion.

Your flowers have inspired Persian poetry for eons, decorate ancient vases and ewers, were
planted carefully in the garden of kings. Your fruit, orange-red drupes covered in silvery scales,
are edible and sweet. My Appalachian grandmother made a jam of them. She powdered the dried
berries and mixed them with buttermilk as a medicine for joint pain. She talked to you in
springtime as one of her familiars.

Gary Phillips is a land-based poet living in the community of Silk Hope, and the former poet laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina. A child of Appalachia and the Civil Rights Movement, he lives in a rammed earth house with his wife, Ilana Dubester, who is a community activist.