Wheat
 

REVISION:

(Structure changed, some elements removed, including last stanza, some changes of wording too)

Wheat

Once a slender face in the crowd
of wind-waltzing stems
on a modest patch of the Middle East,
now, you can walk for miles
across distant continents
and encounter barely another leaf.

We levered weeds
from stubborn soil,
plucked mucky stones from dead gestation.
Shallow canals
slaked its thirst,
while fences foiled fugitive rabbits.

With hernias and slipped discs,
bodies inflamed by arthritis,
we made a trade:
our life on foot
for days of bending over
as we roamed our meadows
and mastered a plant with baskets and blades,
that somehow, it seems, mastered us.


ORIGINAL:

Wheat

Once a slender face in the crowd
of countless stems waltzing in the wind,
a wild grass enamoured farmers
on a modest patch of the Middle East.

Millennia passed:
you can walk for miles and hours
across swathes of other continents
without encountering another leaf.

Enslaved, we levered weeds from soil,
plucked mucky stones from dead gestation.
Our shallow canals abolished its thirst,
and fences foiled fugitive rabbits.

We traded a life on foot to settle,
to stay put and roam our meadows,
mastering wheat with baskets and blades,
blind to how it mastered us.

Inheriting hernias and slipped discs,
the cold crippling of arthritis
punctuated the bones of those
who tended fields until their bodies failed.

Think of this – a plant’s success –
when cereal crunches against your jaw,
when you cut a slice
from your loaf of bread.

Hi, Trevor—

Three responses:
1. You’re presenting information that resists poetic treatment. (I recognize this problem because I often find myself doing the same thing.). I can’t help but feel that this is a poem that really wants to be a piece of creative nonfiction.
2. Wasn’t agriculture what allowed hunters and gatherers to adopt a much more comfortable life in permanent settlements, amassing possessions, storing food, increasing their lifespans, domesticating animals, developing civilizations? It’s hard for me to see the dark side of wheat cultivation.
3. The last stanza seems “tacked on,” like the “moral” of a public service announcement.

Your thesis, that advancements in agriculture have led to human unhappiness, could be the nucleus of an interesting piece of prose nonfiction. Convince me that gluten is poison, that sedentary lifestyles lead to diseases not found in hunter-gatherer or pastoral societies, that domestication of animals leads to zoonotic diseases and a less healthy diet, that the Bible recommends living in tents and keeping flocks. I just don’t think a poem is the right vehicle for it, nor does it give you the space you need to develop your supporting evidence.

Hope this is helpful—

Glenn

Hi Trevor, I think there could be a poem here, but that it isn't one yet. Maybe there is a phrase or thought buried in there that could be a poem's seed.

Though if your motive for writing the piece is to persuade people that agriculture is harmful, or something along those lines, then I agree with Glenn that poetry probably isn't the right vehicle.

Hi Trevor,

I am going to just pop in with some thoughts and hope there's some relevance among my bullshit. I think I know what you are addressing as a theme in this piece. I've read many times that the beginning of agriculture was the beginning of the need to organize into communities, villages and towns. I've come across various versions of a corollary question encountered throughout my life, essentially, whether civilization is really worth all of its assorted pains and complications. Freud's most commercially successful and most generally read book addressed some of the concerns. He called the book, "Civilization and its Discontents." I've often read references to the idyllic, romanticized lives of nomadic peoples and Polynesian islanders who are free of the so-called evils of property laws and of being fortress-bound, of being crowded in diseased quarters, of being governed, of being bound to drudgery to avoid subsistence living. You don't speak of it in your poem, but animal husbandry is connected to agrarian beginnings too. Although animals can be more mobile than a field of wheat (can graze on wild grasses and provide milk and meat on the move), the renewable food sources provided by farming benefits livestock as well as humans. When people clear a patch of land, dig canals, build reservoirs and aqueducts, start putting up fences and walls, erect fortifications and develop new tools and vessels, the needs and ideas just start feeding on each other and before you know it, you have Cleveland and a work ethic. You also have museums, art galleries and produce stands.

Well, that's briefly my take on your theme. I can see the value in opining on the issues involved. The question is how to do it in a poem. That brings us to the problematic consideration of what poetry is or isn't. I read modern poems from current lit mags and see many that are just prose broken up with line breaks. Oh, sometimes the poet sticks in a weird metaphor or two to disguise it. Alternatively, I also see completely incomprehensible exercises of surrealistic pretense. It seems it's possible to get published either way, and maybe the biggest trick is to have an in with an editor. My general advice though is to write poetry passionately and not rationally whenever you can. And yes, the passion can be for language and not subject matter, and that gives poets a lot of room and opportunity to take on many subjects.

All the best,
Jim

Hi Trevor,

How would you feel about ending with "blind to how it mastered us"?

Cheers

David

Hi Glenn,

Thanks for your take on this. Yes, it's hard to work it into poetic form, but I'm going to give it my best shot and see what happens anyway. I don't disagree with agriculture in general or even wheat cultivation. I guess I just wanted to present the success story that is wheat, and maybe I over-egged the negative effects on humans, so I'll look into that, maybe deleting the 5th stanza (and possibly the 6th for the reason you pointed out).

Very helpful, indeed, Glenn. Thanks very much for taking the time to think it through and express your thoughts so clearly.

All the best,

Trev

Hi Hilary,

Thanks for your feedback. No, I didn't want to suggest agriculture in general is a bad thing or mainly harmful. I mainly wanted to focus on the story of wheat and how it proliferated (with some physical cost to humans too).

Thanks,

Trev

That's a very vague aim, which might help to explain why the poem feels prosey and generic.

Edit- That sounded harsher than I meant it. I just think maybe there is another way to come at the material, with a narrower focus, some odd (in a good way) angle that only you would think of … hope that makes sense.

Hi Jim,

That was quite the entertaining and enlightening comment. Thanks for your feedback. Lots for me to mull over there.

Trev

Hi Hilary,

That makes absolute sense, and no need to apologise. You're just giving your honest take on it. Such a comment should only appear harsh to someone whose ego can't take it, I think.

Many thanks for your feedback.

Trev