Month: May 2023

Surveying Decayed Acreage — a poem

/ Portofino / 3 Comments

image by Charley

“April is the cruellest month, breeding….”

– T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

And yet we breed, and yet multiply,
though now more than ever dying
emotionally, spiritually – bankrupting
our future accounts for Present’s sake.

Forsaking the hard work that’s required
to bring in a benevolent crop, plowing
over current culture’s compost, discing
soil nutrient-stripped; on love relying
rather than self-love and convenience.

(I speak from the vantage of shoulders
stronger than mine – thoughts learned
beyond that of which I’m capable – a
viewpoint fairly familiar to many of the
high school scholars I attempt to teach.)

I’d rather an ice age of flash freezing
death than summer rains producing
disease, and intellectual famine aping
a bounty of world-building goodness.

We are either indoctrinated, ingesting
GMO nutrition and AI realities — or
by chance, challenged, awakened
to the fetid field from whence lying
weeds mimic hearty grains, choking
out the harvest of a thousand years.

Ah, but who is there to bother girding
themselves for the labor, who’s willing
to exchange leisure for toil?

If April is indeed cruel, the oncoming
months are going to be quite deadly.