Winter Kill

June 13 2015

A bald patch

on greening lawn.

Dead grass

the colour of straw

in dry compacted soil.

Black earth

rich, and loamy

and crumbly wet.

Firmly compressed,

squeezing out

between sturdy fingers

weathered skin.

And seed, light as wind;

inert little spindles,

containing the germ

of growth.

Mixed, and watered, and left.

To sun, and air

and life's basic imperative;

roots burrowing

into darkened depths

blades shooting up.

Its sense of direction

infallible.

The miracle of seed.

Life,

as profane

as it is holy.

For beauty's sake?

Or for its own?

I filled in a few of the worst bald spots on my lawn.

I was reminded of the everyday miracle of seed. Of the power of information: the same 4 letters of DNA, containing the all diversity and complexity of life on earth.

And we, gifted with consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness, cannot help but ask its meaning -- the meaning of life, its purpose. We want to impose order and direction, an idea of progress. We want there to be an ineffable God, making sense.

But I'm an atheist, and a nihilist. So my answer is both materialist and reductionist. Believers might call it evasive. Which is to say that survival and reproduction is all there is. Everything grows for the sake of growth: both a beautiful lawn, and an all-consuming malignancy. You can call it beauty, or call it cancer; but either way, it's for its own sake. And just as beauty is an imposed notion, so is purpose: determined by us, and for us. ...And anyway, according to the law of thermodynamics, will all end in the dark, no matter what.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself: allowing the last 2 lines to turn a simple poem into a question on the meaning of life. And worse, to then answer by saying there is none!

(Actually, this idea isn't just there in the last 2 lines. I think a close reading reveals a consistent ambivalence about all-consuming growth :  starting with germ, then running through imperative and profane, there is an implicit questioning of growth for its own sake. And just as nature consumes and competes to fill all available space and exhaust all available resources, so do we. No point. That’s just what the life forms that survived – human, and otherwise -- were successful doing.)

Although I doubt anyone (but me) would have read the poem that way before having read this blurb. (And most still probably don't see how the last line asks such a profound question, or implies such a nihilistic answer.) I suspect it would much more likely have been seen as a commentary on the cultural construct of beauty: the arbitrary standard of good and bad; of worthwhile and worthless. Lawns are coming to be seen this way: a standard of domestic beauty that only exists in the suburban culture of the last half century or so. But even though a different title -- something like "Growth" -- might have helped aim the reader a little closer to my direction, there are three reasons I stuck with Winter Kill: I think it's a great title to draw the reader in; I like its misdirection, since the poem begins with death but doesn't dwell there; and I'm not particularly enthusiastic about being so black in outlook, and so don't mind in the least if the reader doesn't accompany me there.