Life Force - Feb 23 2024

 

Life Force

Feb 23 2024



The dry grass

has stopped growing

in the unrelenting sun

of a hot prairie summer.

I stand

under a high blue sky

that seems limitless,

look out at a horizon

that seems infinitely far away.

While beneath my feet

the surface is cracked and creviced;

like the bed

of a desert river

that stopped flowing ages ago.

The straw-coloured blades

have been drained of their life force,

so they lie flat

over parched ground

holding out for rain.

Or will it be fire,

racing across

the vast treeless plain

under a pall of thick black smoke?

But now, it's a sea of grass,

rippling in smooth golden waves

as a desiccating wind

passes over it.

While underground

sturdy roots are flush,

harbouring the precious life force

that will survive fire

and effloresce in rain.

How elegantly

prairie grass adapts

to this unforgiving place.

And how the land

will outlast its colonizers.

The squatters who have claimed it,

and the wheat they planted

hoping for a bumper crop.

But who, eventually

will throw up their hands and flee,

after battling the elements

and admitting defeat.

Leaving the grass to grow,

nature

to heal herself.

It's curious, how little it takes to trigger a poem. Simply the words “dry grass”, and this image of a flat undulating landscape covered by a vast expanse of rippling prairie grasses immediately materialized for me. I thought about the timeless endurance of prairie grass, the struggles of the first settlers and their naïve ambitions in an unexpectedly harsh land.

As well as the environmental benefit of perennial grasses as an excellent carbon sink, sequestering it in the soil for generation after generation. Perhaps a better solution to climate change than trees. (Although this was left out of the poem. At least in any explicit way. It may be implied, depending on the reader's background knowledge and politics.)

And once again, the recurring trope of man vs nature comes up. This may seem intentional, but isn't. I suppose it just bubbles up from my subconscious: a fundamental part of my worldview that, like it or not, keeps demanding to be heard.