April Napowrimo Day 19
A backward response to the poem https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/142880/how-they-speak-of-the-fields by Shamala Gallagher.
The challenge was to start with the last line of a poem not known to you and respond, line by line, backwards through the poem. I think I was supposed to counter each line with another thought but I did my own thing and this is what I came up with. Not sure what you’d call it but it’s here. It was an interesting exercise! The bullet points mark where I met the next line of the original poem, starting at the bottom. The poet was unknown to me and I had no idea at all where she was based until I had finished and looked it up.
• Another field, not this,
Not hedge, nor heavy clay
Nor stones - not even pebbles! -
Fine as sand, red, vibrant, light and rich,
• My thoughts so often live there,
With the snowy cotton and the cottonmouth;
• My eyes don’t need to close
To smell the baked, hot earth and hear the
Crazy night-time chorus of the crickets!
• I wasn’t born there
But have long embraced its fire-ant soil,
this rattle-, copper-, moccasin abode,
And it has me;
• (I have never seen those reptiles –
”A good miss!” the ebony-skinned farm worker smiled,
Gleamingly,)
He too was not
• a native to those fields,
Born there but always other,
Yet content
In these rich pecan orchards, peanut fields,
Watching turkey vultures circle,
V-shaped before they glean,
• I’ve watched a generation
Of leather-footed children run and play
Indifferent to the danger,
Laughing as the anecdote is told and told again
Of Judith, with the youngest on her hip,
A sun-baked, carefree girl of just fifteen,
Calling to the men as she stood motionless
Beside the washing-line,
A baby rattle-snake entrapped beneath her toe,
As it tried in vain to strike.
• Much later now
And married with her own,
She works these self-same fields,
Strives to preserve the joy and freedom
That she knew when just a child;
• Looking with her kin to reap
Rewards not temporal, “laid up in Heaven for you”,
And she sings of grace not earned,
But hers by faith;
• So often I have wanted
To step with one swift movement
Over western sea and land
To sit again with these dear friends, like family,
And talk, or not, or listen and then sing
• Of that reward,
Of Eden without venom, without toil,
All this Georgian beauty
Almost grasped but still ethereal,
• This good soil must be worked
Before a harvest can be reaped,
This rich, red, fertile soil,
This quiet land,
Alive with the sounds of hummingbird and eagle,
• And in my mind,
I run it through my fingers and am glad
These fields, these dear, beloved people
Are just a promise
Of a joy that lies beyond.
Una Kavanagh. April 2018.
