Three Farming Poems

THE GARDEN SPOT

That patch of land beside the road,

below the old barn, is Kendrick land—

those terraces thrown up by a Kendrick man,

long lost the art of nine up, three down,

moving dirt by plow,

gone the cotton boll and wagon road.

All that’s left is hayland, cut by another,

and vegetables, worked and watered.

NEW FARMER

I wonder what the sight of it all

(the ground as hard as the fact of drought,

the corn so pitiful

and tasseled out at two-feet tall)

means for him who hasn’t seen

drought, flood, weevil, and wrath of God,

and if his corn is cause for doubt. 

THE BLACKBERRY ROWS

The men and women of the blackberry rows

work long: a long, long way from somewhere.

Some still have shirts draped over head, though

the moon is kinder than the sun, kinder but queer,

people picking blackberries at night, ghosts  

flowing in and out of flood lights, fingers

stained from blood or blackberries or both,

(those are no thornless canes, I assure you)  

with no sound but the electric hum

of generated light and the loud silence 

of men and women a long, long way from home.