Pilgrim Clay: Parts I & II

[Jimmy O'Connell]

Pilgrim Clay

I

The floor of Mercer County is soggy,
And wet it waits dry spring winds for sowing
After winter snows and rains have bogged in;

And in this place, where no seagulls glide, yet
Its clay in garden, flowerbed, harrowed field,
Wafts seaweed salt on a moist southern breeze.

Over cups of coffee we sit, apart,
Absorbing within our composed silence,
A self-fermenting soggy ground in sap,

Pondering bleak moments where origins
Will never be known except they emerge,
Pure gift, unexpected, in dumb sensing.



II
Hillocks not the height of a Chevy truck,
Nothing to break the wind, not hedge, nor ditch
But the gable end of a barn. A blight

Was souring potato fields in Ireland
When German farmers Leistenschneider, Gast,
Beckman bought, at a dollar an acre,

A churlish clay, yet biddable, a contour
For Teutonic precision; now you can walk
Five miles without a bend on the road

By fields yet to be sown in bean and corn -
Contours of the self resist such logic -
Back Home we furrow when landscape allows.

[lizzytysh]

Hi Jimmy ~

Your poetry is so infused with a feeling of historical significance... how the years and the centuries pass... how people live out their lives on those landscapes.

This one reminds me of a photograph made from an old silverplate, glass negative [not sure if that's the correct way of describing it]. It's of Irish farmers in their interesting work clothes, hand tilling amidst the furrows of a potato field. It's intriguing and I ought to get it framed. It's from out of a historical museum in Ireland, I believe maybe Dublin, and is approximately 2x3 feet. Your poem would sit beautifully alongside it.


~ Lizzy

[Jimmy O'Connell]

Thanks Lizzie...

There's also a famous photo of Three Farmers on Their way to a Dance... which I think is what I associate these German farmers emigrated to the US and settled in Ohio... working the land... tilling the clay.

Jimmy

[lizzytysh]

That's a very good association.

Interesting interpersonal dynamics going on, too; with the stoicism of some relationships.


~ Lizzie