EARTHWORKS
She keeps her own pace slow by ours
rapid enough by hers where seasons are a few ticks
in a millennium. We think of it as work
because ours is, tending her, planning and managing
as if she needed us. On a working farm like this
for all we know the ground is playing with us,
with the hearty women greeting us today
for the tour, most of them impossibly young.
We sit on bales of hay watching a farm mother
in tight jeans shaving the skin off a pumpkin
then worrying human eyes into its still-blank face
with small tools while children jump
from bale to bale, then scurry off
to dig excitedly with shovels new to them
having never heard of work.
A barrel of oil
is the energy of roughly 25K hours of human labor;
also earthworks. We Americans each take
25 such barrels a year like an army of serfs
so we never have to grow our own food,
can visit a working farm like this for amusement.
Out of the furrowed ground come awkward stalks
of beans, tomatoes, corn each so unlike
their scrubbed regular faces lining the shelves
and counters in the supermarket.
Dirt startles our feet trained to pavement
an angry spaniel snarls, barks at us from its pen
for being where we don’t belong
the horse shakes her head and stamps impatient
for her dinner we’ve delayed.
Sands under the belly of the Ganges
not numberless but beyond easy calculation
as are the river’s waters in droplets measured
share moments that are sometimes under-thoughts
impractical, indifferent to use, motionless.
