Lawrence (Mack) Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
30 April 2020
The Poetics of Tomato Plants
The enforced isolation of The Virus-Time has led y’r ‘umble scrivener to plant a garden and to read more poetry
The garden is mostly unplanned, for I meant to be happy with a few sunflowers and some tomato plants and my existing apple trees. However, a young friend who haunts the big-box stores at the ends of seasons brought me tomato seedlings, marigold seedlings, squash seedlings, nasturtiums (nasturtia?), lavender and other mints, zinnia seeds, a little mulberry tree, three little lemon trees, and two little apple trees.
With the lockdown I did not find sunflower seeds, and so scouted out old packets, including one I bought in South Dakota years ago, and while the germination rate was low, I have about twenty young plants who turn their heads to the rising sun each dawn. Biologists tell us that heliotropes don’t really choose to greet the sun; their DNA is programmed to blah, blah, blah. Poor biologists – they seldom perceive the magic.
Some of the squash failed, and I replaced them with eggplant I found at Darrell and Kathy’s The Barn in Kirbyville while buying a sack of chicken scratch for the birds and squirrels.
Curiously, I don’t care for about half these fruits and vegetables, feeling that if God wanted us to be vegetarians He would not have invented and blessed Jenny’s Fried Chicken and Sonic’s Breakfast Toaster. But tomatoes and such are easy and rather fun to grow, and are aesthetically pleasing in appearance.
I was raised on the farm, but this is about as agricultural as I want to get now, although I am a Life Member of the FFA courtesy of Jody Folk and Kirbyville High School. The FFA is a great program for young people, and teaches mature self-governance and mutual respect as a requisite for any activity, including raising cattle and crops.
After a few hours of dragging hoses these dry spring days, the cool, breezy late afternoons are perfect for lingering outside with a refreshing beverage and some of the books we perused only lightly and under duress in school.
Poetry was culturally significant in all social and economic classes in England, Europe, Canada, and the U.S.A. until after the First World War, whose death and desolation led to a cultural collapse that remains with us (https://www.history.com/news/how-world-war-i-changed-literature). The works of John Milton, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley (unhappy name), William Wordsworth, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling and thousands of published, unpublished, and parlour-poets celebrated all the challenges, sorrows, and victories of life. Every newspaper once published poetry, and all school functions featured original student work. If it was often clunky and derivative, well, practice is how we make good work in the end.
My uncle, Bob Holmes of happy memory, a farmer and dairyman, over coffee recited from memory John Milton’s “On His Blindness.” I’m not sure he finished high school, but he remembered this favorite from his boyhood.
Despite the post-war infestation of free verse (which is not verse at all), such poets as Robert Frost, James Weldon Johnson (“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” George McKay Brown, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Wendell Berry, Claude McKay (his “If We Must Die” was quoted by Churchill in defiance of the Nazis), and so many others, in spite of fashionable despair continued to write poetry that addressed and celebrated the human condition meaningfully and skillfully.
In 1945 Field Marshal Wavell (https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/wavell), who in 1915 lost an eye (but never his true vision) at Ypres, published an anthology of poems that had been important to him in his military career. Despite its unfortunate title,
Other Men’s Flowers (a quote from Montaigne), this little book demonstrates the strength and skill and muscularity of real poetry as opposed to the weak, self-pitying, I-I-I-Me-Me-Poor-Me free verse drivel now occupying shelf-space that could be used for something more substantial – Mickey Mouse funny books come to mind.
Those who teach at home (there are no such constructs, either as nouns or verbs, as “home school” or, worse, “homeschool”) or who work within more formal school situations, could hardly do better than to introduce a boy or girl to Wavell’s anthology from perhaps the fifth grade.
Poetry, like farming and the family, is part of the fertile soil of civilization, not an accessory.
Besides, the bees and hummingbirds will enjoy hearing you read to them.
That’s the latest buzz, anyway.
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