The Geese Are Heading To North Carolina

a poem by Kia-Beth Bennett

Don't tell me we aren't all connected
(The geese are heading to North Carolina)



I stand in a cozy room, admiring the harvest of winter squash

Safety, I think. Security this Winter. 
The frost came late, too late for the potatoes, 
the tomatoes

Who were all impacted by blight,
A strain of whom is remembered as the killer of one million people, the reason two million emigrated, the reason when you hear ‘potato’, 

You think ‘Ireland’

But they didn't die of blight. 
They died because of us. Because humans thought ‘landlord’ and ‘land’ go hand in hand,

Claimed terror of terroir was a given right 

Haven't you heard? There was food in the fields of Ireland, there was food

Within reach of starving children
But there were British in the fields of Ireland
There were bullets, fired to reach those starving children



Back in the root cellar

I flip drying nettle leaves, the deep green a joy
I pluck a few, carry them down the stairs to the kitchen
I'll make tea

While I text my friend Carson
He evacuated two days ago, cramming bunnies and cats into a tightly packed car, driving away from an island to his mother's house

Still in Florida
Still in the path of Hurricane Milton
But with enough booze and weed, he says, to ride out the storm without the panic-inducing fearscape overwhelming his psyche 

I don't remind him that weed won't stop the waves

I am messaging another friend, Alex in Mississippi
Alex almost moved to Appalachia, it'd be closer to friends
Alex isn't in the path of Hurricane Milton 

I sip my tea

My mother's ancestors smuggled potatoes across the St John River, somewhere near Edmundston, Quebec 
I don't know them all that well - 200 years puts a damper on those relationships - but what I'm thinking is that they could still rely on frozen rivers,
that they were able to ignore climate change

They weren’t calculating which varieties to harvest 
before blight hit their seedstock
Because an Autumn drought in Northern New York is a consequence of colonialism
And an Autumn drought 
brings blight 

But I know some of my ancestors, at least, are why I am here. Not just here (sitting) - but here, where the culture in which I pretend to live
is killing my potatoes  
As surely as the British killed children

They were fracturing human to non-human relationships long before 
climate change 
Splintered the ecological patterns
That would have stopped blight in their tracks 

Long before I cried in the fields 

Long before I cried in the fields 

So now, the government is releasing fact-checking articles about 
Hurricane Helene
A category four major hurricane with one hundred and twenty mile an hour winds
That slammed into Southeast North America with an intensity not seen in nineteen years

The storms are getting stronger

The climate is changing faster

The human death toll is at two hundred thirty and rising 

And Milton hasn't yet hit

I will keep calling, 
keep texting,
keep growing food 
I will send care packages
I will build relationships

I will break

The geese are heading to North Carolina 
(North Carolina is under water)