Trying to write a poem,one warm fall day, while watching cows
at bovine lemonade stand
By Gerardine Baugh
Created 9/2011
Between them, between trampled walking paths, and rows of
corn and wheat waving me towards home arising above ideals intertwined from mud
to cow, fertilizer and seeds, feed to table, this puzzled land of eyes, enter
earth’s wizen breath, breathe deep of soil’s hope. This soil, richly deep in reticent songs, sings
out when we shovel into its fecund. (Really!
Fecund! What was I thinking?)
I write, to write, to create in my backyard an attempt to
pen a poem one fashioned in nature, under a tree as I catch the hot breeze that
dances over the clover and fallen grass. I write on white paper that glares the
sunlight into my eyes and pulls away all thoughts of poetry. I wonder what is scurrying up the side of the tree,
and now holds tightly to the branches shade watching me ponder one white, white
paper.
A spider falls, a spider from the leaves that clap around
me singing out Mother Nature praise’s. My attempt to work sends her minions to
make note of my lack of progress. A
horse fly settles on my head for a moment, catching its breath before it takes
flight over the farm fields to join the horses and cows having lemonade, under
a tarp, next to an electrified fence, over a mile away from me. Still, I hate being a park bench to a fly so
I shoo him on his way. Let him rest elsewhere.
How, I wonder, is it that the only impression alighting
on this paper is not from my pen?
Grass green, grass dried brown drifts up and slips around
the page, touching from center to corner then slips back into the multitudes
beneath my feet. I looked out over the
once cut lawn, now without a mower or even a goat, the grass has gone wild. I learned to accept its reality, once I did, I
was able to see the flowers. Chicory, Queen
Anne’s lace, white and blue Clover, there, I met a new world, one that I would
never have experienced if I hadn’t come to terms, to having a broken mower.
The hard wind wound down and died away. I dripped
sweat onto the blank page, a page that never was empty. I just
never looked close enough to see the tiny bugs
that left a no-line trail in an
orgy of discovery, traversing a path to a different place, in a different part of the yard, genuinely , not
only mine
