The farmer's yield

  En ny rockad i onsdagstablån. Det blir tre dikter ur antologin "The echoing green" och så blir fallet även nästa vecka. Jag inleder med en rolig limerick.

***

[There was a young farmer of Leeds], by Anonymous
(From The echoing green : poems of fields, meadows, and grasses. Edited by Cecily Parks. New York : Everyman's Library, 2016.)

There was a young farmer of Leeds
Who swallowed six packets of seeds.
It soon came to pass
He was covered with grass,
And he couldn't sit down for the weeds.

***

  Chase Twichell föddes i New Haven, Connecticut. Hon tog en BA vid Trinity College och en MFA genom Iowa Writers Workshop. Hon är praktiserande buddhist, författare till flera poesiböcker, och hennes arbete återspeglar ofta hennes andliga övningar. Källa: Poetry Foundation


Stirred up by rain / Chase Twichell (f. 1950)
(From The echoing green : poems of fields, meadows, and grasses. Edited by Cecily Parks. New York : Everyman's Library, 2016.)

I fired up the mower
although it was about to rain -
a chill late September afternoon,
wild flowers re-seeding themselves
in the blue smoke of the gas-oil mix.

To be attached to things is illusion,
yet I'm attached to things.
Cold, clouds, wind, color - the sky
is what the brush-cutter wants to cut,
but again the sky is spared.

One of two things can happen:
either the noisy machine dissolves in the dusk
and the dusk takes refuge in the steady rain,
or the meadow wakes shorn of its flowers.
Believing is different than understanding.

***

  Helen Hunt Jackson ledde ett svårt liv vid gränsslätternas Colorado; hon förlorade sin man och två barn under sin livstid. Hon var emellertid bland de första författarna att uppmärksamma den amerikanska indianens tillstånd genom sina två böcker, "Ramona" och "The Indians Plight." Källa: Colorados great women

Poppies on the wheat, by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)
(From The echoing green : poems of fields, meadows, and grasses. Edited by Cecily Parks. New York : Everyman's Library, 2016.)

Along Ancona's hills the shimmering heat,
A tropic tide of air with ebb and flow
Bathes all the fields of wheat until they glow
Like flashing seas of green, which toss and beat
Around the vines. The poppies lithe and fleet
Seem running, fiery torchmen, to and fro
To mark the shore.
                                    The farmer does not know
That they are there. He walks with heavy feet,
Counting the bread and wine by autumn's gain,
But I, - I smile to think that days remain
Perhaps to me in which, though bread be sweet
No more, and red wine warm my blood in vain,
I shall be glad remembering how the fleet,
Lithe poppies ran like torchmen with the wheat.