A Poem On a Monday

As promised, here's my poem about farms--how everything that grows is a slice of the countryside, how everything that happens out there becomes part of the earth. I was inspired some years ago while driving on a rural highway past farm after farm when the idea that my presence and the exhaust from my car and the music I was listening to and the birds I saw perched on fences--all of it was impacting the atmosphere that grows the food we eat and thus to eat is to bring that atmosphere into your body. The idea struck me so much that I pulled over and wrote the bones of this poem. It was previously published in Harpar Palate. Here goes:

What’s On a Plate

All meals have the earth in

common, whole landscapes

for breakfast, lunch. This is

what it means to eat: a well

at Parson’s farm, rust from

rain on silo roofs, doe blood

from a barbed wire fence;

gravity pushes all things in

to the dirt. We eat from there.

Radio towers out in the country,

words on waves in the ground now,

a tractor’s red reflectors, wind

chimes, the breath of all who

pass by. The earth must

harbor breath from 20 years

ago. My eyelash is in the soil

somewhere too. There are

dreams in the country and who

knows what cows dream. 

Oak and dog bark and wild noise,

there probably has never been

a time when wind and four legs stood

still. Midnight and 5 am, lonely hours. 

There’ve been bruises and sweet talk,

cigarette butts and an unstrung aura

that binds itself to dirt and the heads

of everyone who’s ever been,

all of it gets folded in. And bare

feet from daughters running

perpendicular away from it all.

The prints do not trace back.

Casey Lord