People of Corn

By Jacob Wheeler

Sun editor

Eaters of corn we are in this August golden heat. Lined up at picnic tables, our teeth move horizontally, carving a path across long corn ears—like a prolific typewriter always moving the paper right to left as the keys punch out letters, words, subliminal messages.

Remember that typewritist in the navy blue beret who wrote poems for everyone who stumbled out of the jazz club on Frenchman Street in New Orleans? What was it he wrote about corn? How the Mayans in the Guatemalan highlands believed that all people were made of corn. The writer Miguel Angel Asturias explained it in his book “Hombres de Maiz.”

So why not look to the sky and ask Asturias if we Michiganders, too, could be made of corn, especially in the month of August. He could write it on his Patria typewriter imported from Switzerland. And as his paper moves, right to left, we would rise from our picnic tables, our lips dripping with butter and pepper flakes, and dance across the country fields. We dance around the cornstalks.

Some of us would move close and bring our lips and tongues together. Not just for pleasure but to pry free the corn kernels lodged between our teeth. We’d grow from eaters of corn into people of corn. Hombres de Maiz.