Ever since I saw the phrase, “They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds”, I have been so moved.  I am a part of so many communities that have survived burial, in the manner of the phoenix. 

We are resilient and resourceful like seeds that are nourished by hope instead of fear, possibility, instead of prisons, new and green ways of being. It is powerful to be able to turn what seems like unrelenting loss and sacrifice— both voluntary and involuntary—of our humanity in these banally brutal times, where death is just a click away. 

I first saw this expression in Spanish, in the context of the Ayotzinapa massacre in Mexico 2014, where 43 student teachers from a rural teacher training college were massacred and their bodies further dehumanized. The case has rocked Mexico, where violence has become a commonplace element of both the economy and the political environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Iguala_mass_kidnapping

I wanted to find the atrribution of this powerful phrase and see that it is originally attributed to Dinos Christianopoulos (1931) of Thessaloniki, Greece. As a gay poet, he said, “ what didn’t you do to bury me / but you forgot i was a seed”.  Since 1978 when he penned it, the couplet has travelled on the wind, in the manner of seeds, and taken root wherever the marginalized cry for social inclusion and justice. Most recently, the migrant rights movement in the U.S. has also adopted this as one of it’s slogans. 

https://www.newsanctuarynyc.org