Mowing Leaves of Grass, Matt Sedillo

During the recent US Independence Day, many of us re-read the speech, “What to a Slave is
the 4th of July?” by Frederick Douglass. His rhetoric is powerful, the fiery indignation of a
brilliant, righteous man who has no fucks left to give in the face of cruel, enduring injustice. “For
it is not light that is needed,” he tells us, “but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.”

Matt Sedillo has crafted a similar creed for our times. In Mowing Leaves of Grass, he brings the
fire and thunder. Ranging from rhythmic spoken word to looser free verse, the poems are
rushing rivers of wrath, recrimination and retribution. Many are like chants or litanies, iterations
of wrongdoings. Sedillo is interested in teaching history in ways schools never do: bursts of
unadulterated truth, the kind one hears whispered from abuelos and viejos borrachos,
remembering the brutal times that have come again to plague their comunidad.

Stand-out pieces form the contours of Sedillo’s “argument. In ” Beginning with “Pilgrim,” he
draws a line in the sand: “We didn’t cross the borders / The borders crossed us / Who you
calling immigrant / Pilgrim?” The problem is spelled out in the final words of “The Devil,” in which
the speaker gloats, “I am the motherfucking devil / And I run shit / What the fuck you gonna do
about it?” Sedillo’s answer is made clear in “Raise the Red Flag”: “And I didn’t come to hold
hands /I came to talk shit / Raise the red flag / See who’s still with me.”

The urgent need for revolutionary action is at the heart of this book. “Pedagogy of the
Oppressor,” for example, reminds us what passes for instructional philosophy in the US (“And
when they read / They read in conquest / And when they thought / They thought of process”) as
well as what’s being done to our children in the school to prison pipeline we call public
education: “Line up the children / It’s getting late November / Teach them Pilgrim / Teach them
Indian / Speak of gratitude / Speak of friendship.”

Though the oppressor doesn’t perceive it, Sedillo reminds us that the oppressed won’t take this
injustice forever. “The Servant’s Song,” for example, we peer into “the servant’s quarters” where
“The servant’s daughter / Sings a different song / One of blood and conquest / Fire and
vengeance / Dawn and the horizon / Of a new day rising.” Learning about other oppressed
peoples and the revolutions they carried out, “She laughs / She weeps / She dreams / She
speaks / With the others / And with each passing day / They grow strong.”

Sedillo doesn’t just call us to action. He looks forward at what could come next, after the
reckoning. A return to ancestral ways, timeless traditions rooted in Indigenous soil. The beauty
of the poet’s vision is nowhere clearer than in the final lines of the title poem: “I am you / And
you are me / Looking to the stars / Searching for the end / To a poem / That never began / That
always was / And forever shall be.”

Matt Sedillo has heard that eternal poem the Mexica called in Cualli Cuicatl—the beautiful song,
trilled by the birdlike souls of our ancestors, winging down to us from the thirteen heavens. In
the pages of his timely collection, you may learn to hear it, too.