The poem reads as a set of planting instructions for "sang," the Appalachian word for ginseng, a root often said to look like a small human figure. The speaker moves between song and practical advice: plant the berries right away, because they can rot, and don't wait until after supper. The seeds are slow, taking twenty months to sprout, and the poem compares them to stones that keep growing as if they had passed through the gut of some vanished prehistoric animal.
What the speaker feels is a mix of patience and reverence. Planting becomes something close to a funeral, as the poem tells us to pretend we are burying a grandparent piece by piece. The red berry is "blood-colored," and the prayer for "uninterrupted sleep, & an end to sleep" suggests both dormancy and death, but also waking. The mood is quiet and ritual-like, a little eerie, yet oddly tender. The last line, with a rumbling stomach, brings the body and the earth together.