Mahaila Smith, Seed Beetle: poems

 

Thesis

It was something the discourse got stuck on:
Where the eels came from.
No one had ever seen them mate.
Maybe all I needed to know
Was how they changed form and why;
what question they were answering when their bodies
adapted from freshwater to salt.
How did the passage of time move in a fluid cycle?
How could they continue to make their pilgrimage
through so many man-made barriers?

The full-length poetry debut by Ottawa-based poet Mahaila Smith, following two chapbooks, including one through above/ground press, is Seed Beetle: poems (Hamilton ON: Stelliform Press, 2025), a speculative collection set as an assembled manuscript composed well into an imagined future. “I found the following material in notebooks and desk drawers,” the “Foreword” begins, “in blog posts and hard drives during the process of creating the Nebula Armis fonds in the years following her passing. An archive of her poems is now housed in the Chamberlin Collection of Poetry of the Toronto Public Library.” The “Foreword,” by the way, by the fictional “Dip Seshadri,” is dated “New Haywood, 2102.” The most overt comparison to this collection would be the full-debut by Toronto poet and filmmaker Lindsay B-e, The Cyborg Anthology: Poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], a collection of poems by robot poets put together some two hundred years in the future, or even the way the late Robert Kroetsch wrote the fictional archivist Raymond assembling the work of a lost poet and her work, The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001) [see my piece on such here]. As, too, B-e, the framing by Seshadri’s preface provides an environmental concern:

            Nebula poured her energy into advocating for the lives of aquatic species. She was a primary organizer of the rally against Veil’s mining expedition to Mars, after it was discovered there was life in the planet’s polar caps. For her role in interrupting this project she was incarcerated for 6 months. All poetry she created during this time was destroyed.
            After her release, we moved to her hometown, New Haywood, Ontario, where we worked with her mothers and the community to take back the land from Utopic Robotics, dedicating our efforts to creating community gardens and supporting the young people and children above all else. Ensuring that they could grow food and provide for their futures. We worked to make sure that the land was accessible to everyone. We met with the Tyendinaga Elders Council, bringing the hard-shelled automated agricultural beetles with us, and their individual stores of seeds to decide what  should become of them. We pooled our seed libraries, made planting calendars, and learned how the plants depended on each other to survive.

As both B-e and Kroetsch did, so too, Smith’s fictional editor, Dip Seshadri, helps frame this collection, providing a further step of distance between the Smith and the poems, offering an opening insight of the late author through the lens of not only as her editor, but as her partner (comparable to Kroetsch’s Raymond, although the archivist fell in love with Rita through her words). As the preface ends: “Nebula was the love of my life. I miss her with all my heart.”

Set in three sections, Nebula’s poems write of repeated layers of death and rebirth, technological advance and environmental crises, utopia and its failures. The narrative framework of this imagined future is curious, interesting; and I’m intrigued at why, specifically, Smith wrote out this future through the lyric as opposed to prose; wondering, perhaps, if there might be a novelization at some point from an alternate perspective around the same narrative this collection offers. Held together, the poems each provide narrative moments of lyrically-straightforward narrative sketches that together accumulate into a larger and broader concern with how technology interferes with repair, and has the potential to interfere with utopia itself. Nebula’s poems offer depictions of days and networks, beetles and histories, and fingers through dirt; as a warning, a look at and through where we might land from the perspective of having been through it.

A Young Automated Beetle
Writing Home

My mummy had soft hands and strong bones.
She was the one who put my solar-powered energy-cell
in my core. The one who whispered
my purpose to me as she brought me and my siblings
to our little runway.

Be generous with your seeds and your water, please.

I am happy when I work because I think of her.
Sometimes I send her little messages just to tell her where I am.
I don’t hear back, but I keep letting her know that I’m ok.
I look at the sky and the dry dirt and my little scooped feet;
She would probably like to see these heavy hills,
of limestone; iron; and quartz;
fragments of mammalian skeletons and disconnected roots
I think about how I want to renew this place
and make it special for her.