CULTIVATOR
THE FOLLOWING IS A SPOKEN-WORD POEM BY YELI TUMSFELD, teacher at the RIPLEY WAY SCHOOL for the DEAF and BLIND. He performed the writing at the Shackle Bar (located on 1113 East Beverly Street) three nights before his untimely passing in August of 2019.
Tumsfeld was a dedicated teacher beloved by hundreds of students during his thirteen-year tenure at the school.
“Imagine you live in a village, in a deep valley somewhere in the upper North American plains twelve-thousand and two years ago.
You are, like most people in the village, a simple cultivator of the marshy earth and its offerings.
You live in a small cabin, made of logged wood and mammoth bone. You have four children, another on the way. Your boys and a girl are happy in the village, playing in the fenced-off wheat fields while chasing one another in a game they call ‘Sabertooth Tag’.
Your youngest child is screaming for his life, running off into the yellow grains taller than him as his sister chases him and growls, both of her arms clenched up at her mouth—two enormous fangs.
Inside, your mind and heart are heavy. There have been massive thunders from the mountains beyond and land unseen. For generations, these crackles of Earth’s might are an omen. The gatherer of knowledge in the village, the shaman, has foretold many great disasters that will soon fall upon the world and kill you and your people.
For months, the shaman has been pleading to speak to the gods, receiving no answer. Have you been ungrateful? You don’t know the answer.
One day, you wake up to a white line covering the distant mountain ridge in your window. It’s almost funny—the mountain tops have sprouted gray hairs.
You walk outside and many others are whispering or bowing their heads. Almost all appear terrified.
You do not understand.
Your children point at it, believing it to be a snow storm coming from beneath the ground.
Your spouse holds you tight and you both fear what the future holds.
The sleep-deprived, pipe-smoking shaman agrees to send a small party of hunters into the open wilderness, past the plains and over the mountain.
The journey will take half a farming season.
You feel ashamed as you are relieved to not be a hunter.
The party returns a week earlier than expected, only one hunter dead following a fever after injuring his foot on the rocky mountainside. But the news is not hopeful.
At the shaman’s temple, the villagers have been called into a large circle and you are shocked.
An endless river flood of rock-hard ice has been scraping and plowing its way across the lands past the mountain ridge.
The river leaves no trace of the land behind it, the very ground pushed up and crushed under the massive weight of the ice. While camping on top of the mountain, one of the hunter used his shoe as a measuring stick. The river was very slow compared to one of water, moving two shoe lengths toward the south, and toward your home, every day.
Now, whenever your children scrape their knee on a rocky pathway or play Sabertooth Tag, with the whole youth of the village pretending to hunt each other for sport, your mind betrays you.
You see your youngest reaching for your hand as they are swept away in a churning river of ice. The mountains crack open and all that you plant and nurture is frozen into withering flowers of tar pitch and blood. Starving peoples, once your friends and close neighbors, now grasping for the last bit of food you have.
The world is ending, not by fire, but by the uncaring freeze of winter.
One day, you will awake to see the ice wall swallowing the mountain whole, carve a new valley from within, and make its way toward you like a frosty white tongue.
The forest below the ridge will vanish, those tall trees toppled over and crushed into gravel.
Your home will be swallowed by the fine powder of everything from the north toppling over itself.
It is coming.
And it’ll be here before you know it.”