Linda Pastan

The Poets
December 12, 2013 Pastan Linda

The Poets

 

They are farmers, really–

hoeing and planting

 

in strict rows ripe with manure,

coaxing each nebulous seed

 

to grow.  Year after year

of drought or rainstorm,

 

locust or killing frost, they bundle

their hay into stacks

 

of inflammable gold, or litter

the barn floors with empty husks.

 

At the market they acknowledge

each other gruffly and move on,

 

noting who has the more bountiful

harvest, whose bushel baskets

 

are laden with beets and tomatoes,

tumescent with fruit.

 

Under the sheen of success

or the long shadow of failure,

 

what they labor for remains

the same: their own muscular

 

beanstalk rocketing skyward

from a single bean.

Linda Pastan was Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991-1995.  In 2003 she won the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement. Her book, Insomnia,  came out in 2015 and A Dog Runs Through It in 2018. Almost An Elegy: New and Later Selected Poems, will be published in 2022.