For My Poetical Life
the only political opinions I care about are from those who've come to speak them most reluctantly
The farmer who is not farming is likely fighting for a farm.
As there are born soldiers, there are born farmers. But threaten the soil of a farmer, one who only in his heart of hearts seeks to plant and tend to his own seedlings, and you’ll discover soldiers can also be made, sometimes out of the most unlikely stuff.
One might ask them: you can speak, why fight? You’ve been cut off from the fields, but you’re not being kept indoors. Why fight?
Don’t you understand, to the honest tiller of the land, words are the most unimportant of seeds. It’s all about their landing and implanting, and when you grant them only rocky consolations, they feel as useful as fruit that’s gone bad but still stubborn on the stem. Even the best creations amount to little more than seeds suspended in air when all cultural context is blighted.
Still, the soldierly uniform, if donned, is like the colors of a passing season. It is worn fully and superficially by one who enlists their entire surface in a fight for the depths. What’s emerged has done so at an emergency pace, needing to detach itself from the roots it has rushed to the defense of, but in doing so temporarily obscuring them too.
Clarity then becomes a rallying cry, because there’s something else, something better and truer the farmer-soldier wants grown to be seen.
Fighter or farmer? As for myself, my heart’s only in the latter but, threaten my farm or deny me reasonable outlet to potentially fertile soil, I enlist.
If ever I seem to involve myself in a political fight, I do so for only one reason: for my poetical life.