I grew up in Northern Ontario, on a subsistence farm. And I mean SUBSISTENCE.
I remember a time my parents sold our dog so we’d have food on the table for a few days.
I remember early mornings going down to the barn, milking the goats. Some mornings, some animals were frozen stiff - it was that mean and cold.
We didn’t have a lot but my parents had that piece of land and I’m forever grateful for that - that they stuck at it and came through.
It made me into the poet I am. Not the books and the famous icons of literature. Not a dreamy nature. Not a love of words. No.
I became a poet through the process of time alone doing farm work, never got time to spend in the house. We needed work to be done. Always just one night’s firewood away from freezing to death ourselves. Milking, chopping, clearing, feeding, chasing animals, fixing, sawing, nailing …
"There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot."
- Octavio Paz.
A poet grows through a process of reflection. The time to be in the world and feel that world, nature, the natural especially. A poet is born through the alchemic persistence of symbolizing - walking through the forest of symbols towards an understanding of why we are here and ultimately death.
And there ain’t no greater teacher about death than a farm, a lowly, poor, struggling farm. The cycle of life is revealed constantly. Watch this 8-minute film. It says it all, my early days, now my poet days.
Poets don’t have any answers. I often wonder why people turn to them for advice on the Afghan war or the obesity epidemic or the crime wave or how to feel happy. It’s stupefying. Auden too declared so.
However a poet knows a thing or two about death and the tricks she plays. A poet knows about how cruel and vile is the world (and beautiful too but mostly cruel in its final judgments). A poet wants to wake people up to this understanding - even make them ashamed for their participation in this vile carnival.
So here is a poem about my youth and about poets. I have no answers, only some time-born, time-fed words.
“I STAND here and watch the people of this world: all against one and one against all, angry, arguing, plotting and scheming. Then one day, suddenly, they die. And each gets one plot of ground: four feet wide, six feet long. If you can scheme your way out of that plot, I’ll set the stone that immortalizes your name.”
― Sam Hamill, The Poetry of Zen
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Go Ask A Poet
It was a cold fall farm morning
the kind where
you see everyone’s last breath.
The cow in the barn
pulled up from the straw
by the nose,
the steam rising up and disappearing
god knows where.
I was 9 or 10 years old
enthralled by Mr. Sparling’s
Popeye like forearms and dark beard,
watching as he
put a bullet into the gun,
into the cow,
the cow just standing there
screaming, screaming
like cows scream.
Mr. Sparling slowly walking over to
the barn door
like this wasn’t the first time
nor the last,
walking back with an axe
in his right hand
then lifting it and smacking it
backside up into
the cow’s forehead,
the cow kneeling down and
with a few more Viking style whacks
rolling over silent.
Now many years and many deaths later
thinking of this,
of Layton’s bull calf too,
thinking of
my own time and space
and that
there are no winners.
Go ask Cesar.
Go ask Marilyn.
Go ask a card dealer.
Go ask a gravedigger.
Go ask a poet.
Tonight when I watch
the news
the body bags, the car wrecks,
the heavy eye shadow
on the newscaster,
when I watch all that
like Li Po
I’ll drink my wine
and laugh from the belly
and dream of my
pink row boat in the sky.
Image - @madinasidarto unsplash.com