«Erbacce d’America»

«Erbacce d’America» begins as a poem Norma Jeane Baker hears in the rhythm of garden work and becomes a small, unruly declaration of collective belonging. The weeds that keep returning to the flowerbeds are made to speak: they can be cursed or poisoned, but they will not be eliminated. The poem’s decisive turn from naming them as weeds to identifying them with America makes persistence, rather than cultivation or respectability, the measure of belonging.

The garden and the poem’s arrival

The scene is carefully ordinary. Norma Jeane is alone in the garden at Captain’s House, with a small hoe in one hand and pruning shears in the other. Her guests are not expected until evening; it is not yet noon, and she has time to work. When she first saw the lawn, she had promised herself that she would keep the flowerbeds clean and prevent weeds from choking them. The trouble is that the weeds grow back so quickly. This practical frustration is not set aside before the poem begins: it supplies the poem’s subject and its pulse. As the shears snap, a poem climbs into her mind like one of the weeds she is trying to remove. The image makes composition feel less like a deliberate literary exercise than an unexpected growth from the work itself. The garden demands repeated cutting, while the verse takes shape in time with that cutting. Its sound is linked to the tool in her hand, and its first impulse comes from the stubborn return of what she had meant to clear away. The poem thus preserves the scene that produced it: the labor, the impatience, and the persistence that frustrates the gardener also animate the voice of the weeds.

From unwanted plants to a collective voice

The poem first names particular weeds, including crabgrass and red thistle, and gives them a rhyming insistence: “Sanguinella, cardo rosso tira, tira a più non posso” and “Strappalana, peucedano noi da qui non ce ne andiamo.” The catalogue keeps the verse close to the flowerbed, but the repeated declaration that they are not leaving broadens its scale. These plants are no longer merely an obstacle to tidy gardening. They become a plural speaker that can answer attempts to remove it. The next movement makes the threat explicit. The speaker says that others may poison or curse the weeds, but that killing them will not succeed. The progression matters: the poem moves from naming, to refusal, to imagining the means of eradication, and then to denying their effectiveness. Its simple rhymes and direct repetitions give the defiance a plain, almost chant-like form. Rather than elaborating an argument, the poem makes its point easy to remember and repeat. The bluntness also keeps the threat visible: poisoning and killing are not softened into a figurative inconvenience, even though the scene began with routine work among flowerbeds. The final question, “Erbacce d’America?”, challenges the name that has defined the plants as unwanted. The answer—“No! Noi siamo l’America!”—replaces that category with a much larger identity. The weeds do not ask to be tolerated as an exception to the garden’s rules; the poem gives them a claim to the ground itself. In this sudden change of scale, the recurring plants become an emblem of a community that cannot be dismissed as foreign to the place where it grows. The poem’s force lies in that reversal: what the gardener might pull out is made to speak as part of America.

Rhythm, play, and Baby

When the poem is complete, Norma Jeane bursts out laughing. Her response belongs to the work’s playful surface: the lines are simple enough, she thinks, that Baby would have liked their rhythm. She imagines making them into a little song to play on the piano. The passage does not say that she actually performs the poem or turns it into music. It leaves that possibility in the future tense, as an imagined transformation from spoken verse to song. The thought of Baby gives the poem an intimate audience alongside its broad collective voice. The verses address an imagined community of weeds, yet their rhythm also calls up the person Norma Jeane imagines would enjoy hearing them. That connection does not erase the poem’s defiance; it places it beside an affectionate, private act of imagining. The same lines can be a chant of refusal and a tune for the piano. Their childlike simplicity is therefore more than a stylistic description: it is the quality that makes the poem memorable to Norma Jeane and suited, in her thought, to Baby.

The hydrangeas and remembered speech

The poem’s arrival is followed by a detail from the flowerbeds that complicates its opposition between cultivated flowers and unwanted weeds. Among the plants are newly blooming blue hydrangeas, Norma Jeane’s favorite flower. Their presence leads her vividly to remember the flowering hydrangeas in the Glazer family’s garden and Mrs. Glazer’s solemn declaration: “L’ortensia è il fiore più bello, Norma Jeane.” The remembered line is an ordinary judgment about a flower, but its emphasis makes it sound like an effort to give ordinary words lasting weight. This memory does not resolve the poem into a simple rejection of gardening, flowers, or the past. The garden contains both the weeds that prompted the verse and the blue hydrangeas that recall a particular household and a particular voice. The poem’s importance comes from how it makes a small encounter hold those different registers at once: physical work in the present, remembered speech, an imagined song for Baby, and a collective assertion of belonging. Its weeds do not cease to be weeds in the garden’s practical terms. In the poem, however, their recurrence becomes a reason they cannot be reduced to something disposable.