Unreasonable Wonder
"Come away with me to the simple countryside; we'll be together & pure!" Pastoral poetry is for city folk. Be apprised; there is toil out here too, but also a wildness that defies your imagination.
Unreasonable Wonder Through the door that is the day light whips to a silhouette reaching back with a leading hand forthright answers are saged, cleansed— the image of the cottage, the puff of the chimney, the rushes, little windows; it doesn’t exist and there’d be things to do, there’d be cobbs in the webs and mites in the rushes and plowing and cooking. Idyllic little chores. Simple grass being greener in my mind. I wrote ‘come away’ for you; I don’t want to be alone in this unreasonable wonder.
Happy Friday reader.
Maybe I’m already sick of New England winter or just that I feel like the warm seasons of my childhood stretched out forever, especially summer.
But also don’t we all idealize something or someone? Maybe I too am guilty of imagining some place that would do the quick magic and change who I am…but like they say: wherever you go, there you are.
Onwards.
-Sean
I’m a farmer too. Here’s a farm poem.
on the ridge
if you stay we might could fix
that run of fence where the deer
slide through like ghosts
leaving fur on the barbels
and those places where
the trees come down
bending the pickets and stretching the wire
with all the work to do again
how will i lay a straight line
without you at the other end
shifting your weight like a nervous horse
when i approach awkwardly
i wonder if you really know
the fate to which you led me
if you stay i may tell you
when the moment arises
see how this stretch of pasture
has been bitten down
how greedy horses are
how thin is all this soil
and the trees
i wish we had more poplars
in our grove instead of
these black walnuts
the walnuts break and fall
lightning kills them
for all that they feed
the wild pigs
as for you and me
let us stay and become this farm
the horses stamp the frozen ground
let the earth swallow us here
“and there’d be things to do,/
there’d be cobbs in the webs”
Fond of the anaphora here, but also your choice to use the contraction. Signals departure, especially with the more formal opening.
Nice work.