I passed spreads of field
the places where farmers
made livings from soil.
The view enticed
but I couldn’t stop.
I couldn’t stop
but I couldn’t forget
times spent on uncle farms
before I went to college.
The morning sun shone
but memories in college
in Ames shone brighter.
There I learned
the language of love
the concepts of life
that I held in my hand.
Each book of psychology
opened worlds that lived
inside me.
I learned to see
they were always a part of me
as were aspirations and dreams.
A Grant Wood mural on a staircase
in the university library
said life began with tillage,
and from that stemmed
our crafts and arts we embraced.
Years later
when on break from work
I walked the steps
to see how the mural
survived the hands of time.
It survived as I
but I never outlived memory.
One less-travelled highway
had lost its name
but I recalled the roads
taken with college friends
as we learned to live our lives.
Many would have for it killed
And blood of The Guiltless spilled,
True Catholics to surprise,
For it fight and let voice rise!
An eye catching Rich Terrain
That knows how to welcome rain;
Enough to envy arouse
Against its tiller a grouse
For this I clench thankful fist
Of one who knows how lips twist,
The Disfavoured Man A Blouse,
An ignited fury to douse,
In this eyes gathering mist
Boxers Glover tight at the Wrist!
But Tillage an appointment
I am a disappointment,
Decrepit labor quite sure,
Harvests that still leave one poor
The apple fell already bitten upon,
a mossy soil coated where the tooth-cleaved.
Soon grubs worked their way out
of the pith
creating a teeming mulch.
Adam had fallen asleep again,
in his gut overripe grapes fermented
turning now to drunken snores.
The apple was changing, morphing,
the earth had gone into labor.
This had not happened in paradise before,
this was self-regeneration,
the copulation of dirt with air.
It was the flood of the moon;
Eve squatted. Her body was changing,
tidal rains washed her blood,
travail begot a tillage of arousal.
Her belly swelled,
instinctively Adam built a nest
of straw, green shoots and saliva.
She grew large, gravid, a tad snappish.
she sensed deep in her belly
that this coming birth
would be both sour and dewy,
an innominate delivery for sure
riddled with good and bad seeds,
and she knew not what to call it.
He counts roots and tendrils,
delves deep into his tillage,
some plantings have escaped
and he wonders to where?
He seeks for the once planted,
finds them, reveals again the beauty
even in the wilderness blooms.
There are many flowers to tend to;
without this inner garden
he might only be an old clay pot.
So he gardens,
waters the ones that have turned
into brier and thorns, after all
he has kept them for a long time,
and some wake him in the night
demanding his attention
even yet.
I heard the call of the wild
It bewildered me and chilled my body
Closed my mind filled
Filled me with uncertainty
I am entrapped in my own village
I have been lapsed
Fell! Fallen to the tillage digging up dirt
Nature's worth
11/24/21
Written by James Edward Lee Sr © 2021
Each petal, leaf, each vein, each thorn, not any one the same,
Stand tall in there duty protecting Their tillage from the dark winged shadows circling the sky's mains
The wind slightly changes and they sway so waiting on the rain.
Each is there own colour with shades all with different names.
Same race, different names, different colours , different shapes and different mothers.
Many layers and characteristic ways and some blooming, others blossoming and some like to sleep away there days.
Sometimes the wind peels off a layer, and at times the rain lay heavy weighing them down until they drop to the ground, leaving no armour.
The sun singes there edges making them burnt and different to the eye.
Sometimes they are open,sometimes closed, but there's one thing that everyone knows about the beautiful, elegant and regal garden guard's ,
that in all there differences, one thing they all were created with in traits,
That they all smell the same, Subtle but intense, delicate and strong.
It's that distinct fragrance, it's the smell of the ROSE.
.
A consistently poor wage
Licenses rage:
An ugly fight against the cage,
Steady enveloping of stagnant wage,
A temper warning every wedge,
Rising while lowered with vintage.
Hirers open a sterile page,
Not a complimenting line for a sage:
Reflections of his usage,
Not a half paragraph for his adage…
The low income earner won’t this manage,
Nor life in his fatiguing village:
The vast hum drums sight,
Of farm-tools tauntingly bright,
For all their promises of fast tillage,
Putting The Townie at a disadvantage.
Any hopelessly downsized wage,
Is cash that the teeth sets on edge,
The Hired white with shock
Over Hirer’s heart of steely lock.
He was airlifted to another place.
The heath, the dales,
the ridges, the high moors,
they all began to slip away
under throbbing wings.
Occasionally a woman would approach,
a silk moth in the semi-gloom
of a night flight;
he was tucked semi-consciously
into a droning life-support system.
When you are unearthed,
green roots tug,
mud and twigs come with you.
Pools and sediment
make their way as seeds and marsh
traveling as your incubated life.
Places you have slept on,
waded across,
had breezy sex over,
they tether you to a tillage and turf,
of lived experience
even as you fly far from it.
He began to plant bits of himself
into the soil of his new home.
He hid mossy stones amid plastic rocks’
left lichen trails
on the marble floors of shopping malls.
He recreated his own clay
from the sand-shifting soil he found
in an alien loam.
Slowly the land began to own him.
He dug himself into the past
of this remodeled wilderness.
Became a native of rooted and uprooted things.
When he was asked:
'to which country he belonged?'
He would show the dirt
under his fingernails.
Flower smiles in the morning
To overthrow any mourning,
Engendering the feeling
That begins soft healing:
Flower displays our choicest elegance,
Exuding the firmest fragrance,
Past striding the hellish gate into the territories of Hate:
All the time too good for the hovel
We’d come across in a novel.
Love miserably can fail
The head revealing with a missing tail,
If flower should be excluded from things
If things be not buoyed by its wings,
On my chest to keep feeling pressure
Of a degree one can’t measure,
When some husband in one hides a knife
And with its loveless blade kills his wife:
Clearly, an unspeakable desecration,
No more no less matrimony’s profanation.
Now we’re pushing for the tillage
Of the gardens in our village,
Vowing to make it just flower or never,
Hoping no anti-florist will be clever
Its planters enjoying the Labor,
They, considering it a favor…
Flower they sight and they‘re well
And when they don’t, in hell!
Not a little something of psychology
Being enacted without apology.
The apple fell to earth. It was bitten through
it rolled; mossy soil coated the tooth-cleaved part.
Already grubs were working their way out
of the pith creating a teeming mulch.
Adam had fallen asleep yet again.
the overripe grapes fermenting in his guts
turning to drunken snores.
It was the flood of the moon.
Eve squatted behind a mulberry bush
wishing she were more fair and slim
like the angels in her dreams. Her body was changing,
tidal rains washed her blood
and that travail begot spawning buds,
the tillage of arousal.
The apple was changing, dissolution morphing
into beauty; the earth had gone into labor.
This had not happened in paradise before,
this was self-regeneration, death, and life,
the copulation of dirt with air.
Eve’s belly swelled, growing as round and burnished
as an autumn apple. Instinctively Adam built a nest
of straw, green shoots and saliva.
She grew large, gravid, and snappish,
stamping her feet impatiently;
this birth would be a paradigm of progeny to come,
a dewy innominate offering
quilted from angelic and demon seeds
and she knew not what to call it.
Tillage
by Michael R. Burch
(a coronavirus poem about stasis and potential for recovery by reconnecting)
What stirs within me
is no great welling
straining to flood forth,
but an emptiness
waiting to be filled.
I am not an orchard
ready to be harvested,
but a field
rough and barren
waiting to be tilled.
Keywords/Tags: stasis, potential, hopelessness, hope, recovery, recovery from disaster, reconciliation, tillage, raw, barren, field, tabula rasa, blank slate, blank verse, isolation, seclusion, distress, distance, distancing, palimpsest, plow, plowing, sow, sowing, seed, planting, farm, farming, social behavior, society, America, planet
He was airlifted to another place.
The heath, the dales,
the ridges, the high moors,
they all began to slip away
under throbbing wings.
Occasionally a woman would approach,
a silk moth in the semi-gloom
of a night flight;
he was tucked semi-consciously
into a droning life-support system.
When you are unearthed,
green roots tug,
mud and twigs come with you.
Pools and sediment
make their way as seeds and marsh
traveling with your incubating soul.
Places you have slept on,
waded across,
had breezy sex over,
they tether you to tillage and turf,
to your life,
even as you fly far from it.
He began to plant bits of himself
into the soil of his new home.
He hid mossy stones amid plastic rocks’
left lichen trails
on the marble floors of shopping malls.
He recreated his own clay
from the sand-shifting soil he found
in an alien loam.
Slowly the land began to own him.
He dug himself into the past
of this remodeled wilderness.
Became a native of rooted and uprooted things.
When he was asked:
To which country he belonged?
He would show the dirt
under his fingernails.
…undeniably tattered and shredded
my itinerary compromised by being
considered as prey and being
expected as a masochistic self-flagellator
losing revenue to the big gun’s atrocious tillage of the mind’s phosphorescence
I bagged the boy’s brigade for being bridges
and then being able to be
nearly my own cerebracy and again
appreciating my own celibacy …
in a rational loss of solicitude for
those obliquely using or anti
I built ramparts against the banality
of the ill-advised and the
ephemeral lacy streak of zig-zaggers
and water-diviners
and lost the locality so as to bequeath my
solid grade before I pop off into
the space of the grey morning light
Now don’t get overstrung
Pumpkin Patch Shenanigans
Puff white cotton candy, royal blue sky
Autumns breathe over a breadth of meadow lie
Tillage field vines pumpkins that catch a bird’s-eye
Grandpa and black bird grand-kids are back in a flyby
Causing havoc with their big pumpkin patch shenanigans
Fearless Scarecrow having an epic heyday and merry-go-round in the congregation
Stands terrifying and saying goodbye to all that flyby in jubilations
10/14/2015
Contest : The Doesn't Fit Contest
Sponsored by: Carol Eastman
When Attila retired to the Village
He looked for some peaceful tillage
But the price of land
Was so out of hand
He reverted to rape and pillage
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