A Meditation on the Land
—remembering a farm foreclosure.
For Darrell Ringer, 1953-93
“Thank you,” he said, while the black eyes
drilled from the shadow of his ballcap
as we stood in the sunbaked square
of a Kansas town where we’d just rallied
against such business as no one with honor
should dare to defend—then drove
over pocked macadam, between shoulders
cascading with purple wild flowers, wheat
turning green to gold—the field after field,
the rich carpet called forth, turned over,
culled with such care that I, for one,
don’t have blisters enough to imagine—
and beneath it the black earth seethes
with world-feeding life. Then we arrived
at his farm. Beautiful, I’d often thought,
this life, how the green soybean hug
at the earth and alfalfa explodes into pink
and animals trudge toward us in the slow-
motion rhythm of paddock-bound shadows
until their heads hike up with quick interest
when haybales are pitched with a thud
between the tarnished steel rails of the crib.
But the earth and its moods are uncertain,
despite the disconsolate pleading it gets
when sleep doesn’t come, that a storm
please pass by without flooding at harvest;
that a drought not set in, the wind not whisk
topsoil to a powder-dry ash floating off
in a glitter-filled cloud to the red
of a summer-long sun. And of course
words are addressed to the Notice of Debt
that’s attached like a leech to the title,
which is after all a mere sheet of paper
approved by the courts but without
the least smell of wet dirt to grace it.
And of all he foresaw or was faced with,
what he couldn’t agree to was losing this land
without even a fight. They might take it all,
but the fight, at least—they couldn’t take that.
*
Learn more about David on our Contributors’ Page.
David’s latest collection, The Green Vault Heist, was published in 2023 by Cornerstone Press and is available here.
(Photo: United Soybean Board/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- A Meditation on the Land by David Salner - October 10, 2024