 |
| Corn and Chemtrails. Copyrighted, Isadora Gruye Photography. |
Welcome Garden Dwellers one and all to the October edition of Out of Standard. Once a month I will set before you a challenge to defy the conventions of a particular theme and find new places in the everyday.
I will begin this month’s prompt by way of a tale, a true and slightly ominous story from my recent work travels.
It was nearly six by the time I had left Des Moines, my rental car heading north on the interstate. Four hours of nondescript landscape was wedged between me and my home. I had playlists decked up on the ipod. I had soda, and apples, and pretzels, and hummus (a far superior meal to any of the fast food I would find at the state-sponsored Freeway pavilions along the way).
Night set on quickly and soon the road and fields around me were pitch black, except for an orb of light on the eastern horizon...a swatch of brightness so big, it would normally indicate a large city or runway. But by this time in my drive, the largest city was 300 miles away. I was flummoxed (and harboring a fear of alien abduction, a little rattled). As I drove onward, the light grew brighter and more patches appeared to the east and west. Soon, the lights were upon me, and I realized the source: giant harvesting machines in the dozens, mowing their way across the land. I turned down my radio, and the hum of their droning filled the car. The rest of the drive through the country was filled with a similar sight: 300 miles of crops being swallowed in the flood lit October evening.
And that, my toads, is what inspired this challenge: the mechanical harvest.
Those of us in the northern hemisphere are well into autumn. A season I have long associated with fat pumpkins and squashes plucked tenderly from the vine, golden ears of corn placed lovingly in piles which resemble pyramids, deep rosy apples carried in aprons from the tree limb to the table where they are sprinkled with cinnamon or baked in between flaky folds of pie crust. I had never considered the machine: the rusty hands, the whirling metal gears, the flood lights glaring through the night. The harvest bringers who run on petro and who will never tire.
 |
| Ain't no Disco. Copyrighted Isadora Gruye photography. |
What I am asking: whirly-gig the bounty....write a poem about the mechanical nature of the modern harvest. The angle and tone is of your choosing but explore! And bring us back something unexpected. I have supplied a few photos to break up the wall of text and to inspire, but they do not have to be used to write your poem. Like every challenge, your poem must by newly written for this challenge and not one previously written which conveniently fits the theme.