Next Year’s Crop

You drive past the cornfields, recently harvested,
the remnants of stalks standing
“like so many wounded soldiers,
a parade field of them,
everything of worth stripped away,
about to become history, spoken of,
the crop of this year or that, or
if there was nothing extraordinary about the year,
forgotten, plowed under and forgotten.

You have lived your life as something of a vagabond,
at times a soldier, at times a general,
at times the walking wounded,
you are full of tales no one wants to hear.
full of tales that need telling
if only for your own sanity.
a need to believe they had purpose.

The cornfields stand.
raw in the sudden cold snap,
and so do you,
for all the same reasons,
always believing
in next year’s crop.

About this poem.

Getting going was hard today. A sudden cold snap of depression.. Pushed back, as it generally is, by persistance and poetry.

The cornfield in the picture is not far from my house.

It’s going to be a good day.

Tom