The Farm Woman. .
Woman of the Earth, you are loved.
You gather the fruits of your labors
to your bosom and feed the children.
You’ve inched your way along the path
with back bent in great fatigue
and cultivated the rows yielding wise fruit.
You would feed out of your mouth, those
you think hungry and then beyond measure.
The fruits are the heart of your labors,
the harvest of your mind’s philosophy,
spilling indiscriminately.
Who is left to feed you, farm woman?
What commissary is left open
to feed your hungry soul after hours?
What bookstall will house the words
between stiff covers to increase your harvest?
Labor till the sun closes its blinds on the day.
Restless legs will speed you through the night,
to find the bins ever full.
This has been an exceedingly difficult year and I am wont to say, it has been the hardest I can remember. Living so long I see excellent surgical and medical care deteriorating simply because of longevity. Medicines that served well previously now have serious adverse reactions. Laughingly under breath we still call it practicing medicine.
The past dozen years on my blog, show my journey has been with insights I had no way of consciously harboring. Everything has come with a very high cost.
It has been too many pairs of sneakers worn threadbare walking the neighborhood because there was no way to prevent mentally fragmenting except by not taking one more step. And having no support system in an unknown endeavor by people who only knew questioning heaven’s principles had one dancing with the devil.
When I found myself in a loud voice saying I had to get back to teaching, I knew it was another memory needing a putting place. Having had no credentials in this lifetime, yet over a half century of daily journals had been scribed and integrated.
Our sons and I haunted libraries and I learned to call my independent study a journey. My only wish was not to embarrass these sons who took to soaring knowledge. Also evident was the fact there was nothing new under the sun. Just new to me yet.
And this year still breathing and wondering why, has been physically difficult. I am no closer to anything provable except my experiences noted and discussed and holding me upright yet. I have loved and alibied my commitments to kingdom come. Now I lack the energy to conjure the exuberance I miss sorely.
I still wonder who harbors within who we are. When the hand was offered after the birth of my youngest when I turned sour, I could not lift my hand to grasp that hand. The babies were mine and I grew them beneath my heart. The hand withdrew.
These two poems come to mind needing putting places, I start and end with both.
Hidden Knowledge
Inexplicably circling my nimbus.
unassailingly circling my heart,
I stand mute and forever chastised
knowing my presence is forever challenged.
Albeit a lay person without credentials
has no merit in the eyes
of the knowledgeable.
A vulgar vessel for eloquence
has no place in a system so esteemed.
But the Farm has nurtured
the seed sown in soil so fertile,
that ribbons of knowledge were carried
in enamel vessels having no crack.
In opinion, heavily laden, garnished,
the knowledge is earned by sheer effort.
The child held the seed
so tenderly and astonished the sages
who wisecracked to themselves
about the wisdom of a God
who hid the sacred teachings
in such a primitive mold.
The wisdom succeeded in succeeding itself
and children thrived when the New World
was born in massive splendor.
Funny, Man thought the God so perverse
that he didn’t choose one of Us.
Man would not accept the child and later
could not accept the child grown Woman.