Wisconsin
Along a gravel road, there lay a farm,
A range of ground owned by my relatives.
Their kitchen overlooked the bottom field
Where hay grew silver-green around the barn
And horses stood in stalls by cows whose milk
Was sold. A diesel tractor pulled the plough
That tilled three hundred acres. Mud-caked plough
Blades turned a quarter acre for a farm
Wife’s garden. Aunt Jan’s best cow, Bossie’s, milk
Was clover sweet. Most of my relatives
Gave up their cows when feed to fill the barn
Cost more than they were worth. That’s when a field
Of beans brought pennies per bushel. A field,
With root rot slashed the acreage under plough.
Worse, worthless crops were molding in the barn.
It’s easy to lose money on a farm.
Some seasons, only loans from relatives
Could cover gaps not filled by selling milk.
In winter, driven snow as white as milk
Lay three feet deep where summer’s soybean field
Became a sled run. Merry relatives
Forestalled their fears for next year’s yield. The plough
Would last another season but the farm
Would need to profit to repair the barn
Roof leaks before spring snowmelt soaked the barn
Owls’ rafter nests. Brown rats befouled the milk
Without the birds to dine on them. To farm
A family place meant ragged nails and field
Dirt in your eyes. At twelve, they learned to plough
And rode horses to visit relatives.
I wasn’t close to my farm relatives,
In my time, they used steel to build a barn
Where at the back they kept an antique plough.
They hated town where supermarket milk
And eggs were old. They craved an open field
Where skies, cathedral-high, above the farm
Are splashed across with clouds like drops of milk
And ripe-gold hay ripples across the field
As red-leafed maples ornament the farm.
A Word to the Wise
If you stray between the corn rows, you’ll get
Lost. A baby near here died that way; her
Name was Gretel. Diaper dragging, she stepped
Past the sleeping dogs and through the broken
Fence, her mother watching soaps and sipping
Tea. She noticed when the sun went down, when
Gretel was asleep a mile from home. She
Lay between the rows and no one knew which
Way she’d gone. They found her two days later,
Pale and dead. Who lets a baby wander off like
That? The worst of us would never be so
Careless. Children that we love know corn leaves
Close above you, ten feet tall on all sides.
Be wise. Stay in sight and don’t leave the yard.
Jennifer Frost is a Midwesterner living in Southern California with her husband and son. She was educated in English Literature at University of Iowa and is presently enrolled as an MFA Creative Writing student at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles. Find her recent pieces in The Rush, The Evening Street Review, and Rock Salt Journal.
I like "Wisconsin's" simplicity of language and also its evocativeness. It is made easy to visualize the scene and way of life depicted, and the poem's plain speech never snags the reader, nor bewilders, nor gives any cause for scratching one's head in puzzlement over what's being said.
The language in "A Word to the Wise" is also simple and clear. But this one gave me some pause. I had to question the seeming assumption that a "baby" in "diapers" could understand the danger of getting lost in a cornfield--could know that "corn leaves close above you" and could leave you unable to find your way back. I thought the "word" might more aptly have been addressed to parents than to babies. "Keep them in sight and in the yard." I'm not sure even "children" a few years older (6,7,8 say) ever worry much if at all about getting lost in the woods.
Nonetheless, since I doubt many have considered a cornfield as a potential deathtrap, I think showing how it can be is worth reporting.
My paternal grandparents and kids lived in NYC during the depression grandma died of diabetes when she was 32. My grandfather, a sheet metal worker, had five kids to support without a wife, so he enrolled them in a convent school run by Dominican nus who used to beat the four older brothers with chair rungs whenever the youngest wet the bed.
My maternal grandparents lived in Fayette Co., PA. during the depression. Grandma used to pray for an easy death, and died in her kitchen at age 62. Grandfather had nine mouths to feed, so he tried a variety of schemes. He ran a still, poached deer and birds with his oldest sons, and occasionally raised small amounts of livestock. My Pennsylvania relatives were poor, but because of the generosity of the land and a thriving barter economy in a largely eastern European coal community, some of the edge was taken off the crash.