Essence
by Kai Coggin
I thinned the seeds already sprouting
in the bamboo garden
the radish beet carrot and bean
pulled each birth
out of the earth
and laid it on my tongue
crushed it with my teeth
and did you know these tiny sprouts
these little leaves and baby greens
already hold the heavy flavors of their final selves?
if only we tasted our own essence from birth
knew the transformations to come
were all part of the becoming—
that we had the imprint all along.
From Mining for Stardust. FlowerSong Press, 2021
Originally published in Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts
Read this and other poems by Kai Coggin in Mining for Stardust, available from Amazon and the author’s website.
At a time when so many of us are watching gardens fade and dead leaves twirl down from the trees, it can be useful to meditate on the beginnings of all the plant life around us, reminding ourselves that they too will soon sprout again. Kai Coggin’s “Essence” offers readers what might be a typical moment for a gardener as she goes about “thinning” the sprouts in her bamboo garden so that each one might have the chance to more fully spread out and grow. Yet the speaker of the poem is struck by how even these tiny leaves “already hold the heavy flavors of their final selves.” The observation might have stopped there, yet the speaker goes on to connect this discovery with our own development as human beings as well. In the final lines, she implies that we might have more faith in ourselves and our own “essence,” realizing that, like her plants, we too carry “the imprint all along” of what we’ll eventually become, and nothing and no one can ever change that.
Invitation for Writing & Reflection: Go back to your own beginnings and see if you can find some of the signs of who and what you’d eventually become. Are there any moments you can describe that stand out as proof of your essential self?
ABOUT THE POET: Kai Coggin
Kai Coggin (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Mining for Stardust (FlowerSong Press 2021) and INCANDESCENT (Sibling Rivalry Press 2019). She is a queer woman of color who thinks Black Lives Matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council and Arkansas Learning Through the Arts, and the host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award and named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016 and 2018. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB, Entropy, SWWIM, Split This Rock, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Tupelo Press, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.
POETRY SELECTION AND COMMENTARY BY JAMES CREWS
James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. James teaches at SUNY-Albany and lives with his husband in Vermont.
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