Mormon Tea

I.
They left
Denmark’s ripening wheat fields,
crossed moss-covered paths
of England and Wales, forsook
the saturated air
of Tennessee to build homes
on ground glazed in the open-air kiln
of the western sun.
Called by God,
they did not think to ask
first peoples for their blessing,
and the land gave nothing without struggle.
But one palatable thing,
they learned from the Diné,
thrived already.
So-called Mormon tea.

II.
I have read the book
they changed their lives for. I have made
the same promises to the same God.
But I start my days
by filling the kettle, waiting
for the whistle
and the alchemical union
of fermented leaves and hot water.
I could not make those promises again.
I have traded
Ephedra nevadensis,
dust-dweller
of the west,
for Camellia sinensis,
cultivated evergreen
of the east.

III.
I remember the feeling when friends
stopped living the Word of Wisdom—
like a thread between us
snapped.
They are my people still.
The men who sent my ancestors
to the desert are still speaking their instructions
through the mouths
of their children’s children.
They are not my cup of tea.
But their God is my God also.
Mormon tea tasted like inside knowledge,
peculiar, ferrous.
My breakfast tea,
color of the eastern brink,
tastes of my own ripening.

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