Terry Trowbridge: Garlic Mustard You Must Learn to Fight Each Year

Kindness can be conflictual.
Learn to pull garlic mustard up by the roots.
Remember: violence is no solution
when the enemy is alleopathic.
The soil remains poisoned with cyanide,
sinigrin, a slew of glucosinates.
Still, remember, the soil remains.
This memory will maintain your purposefulness.

Leave the ground be, after you’ve weeded.
Time away from your hands is essential.
Killing is not victory. Instead,
learn patience for diversity.
Allow the insects and bacteria to return.
A year will pass. Years will pass.
The steps ecology takes toward restoration
are the restoration. Not you. Them.

Garlic mustard will return for decades.
It is the cyclical essence of the colonizer.
It was brought here by the British colonists
whose terra nullius presumptions theorized
the New World lacked culinary herbs.

The only predator is a British-bred colonist:
yourself with the English inherited garlicky palette.
Accept that you are a colonial legacy, too,
Great-great-…-child of chattel-wives
and the scarcity of 1812’s war economy.
Turn that power against garlic mustard.
This is how you never succumb to bitterness
and exasperation:

Learn to appreciate the herb.
Eat it as the United Empire Loyalists planned.
You are a colonizer: bred to hunt to extinction.
Dedicate your power to hunting the poisoners.
Season your meals with the stems of your kill.
Make your own blight powers into a land cure.
Allow the original inhabitants to heal
the soil in your undoing wake.