PEI
As French as steeples
As English as potatoes
Unceded by the Mi’kmaq
“Lying in the Water”
Epekwitk
Tag: farming
Getting Over Canola
Prairie crossings
Keeping time
With the endless swag
Of powerlines
Skimming along
The road unreels
Mile after mile
O’er canola fields
Intersections
And railway lines
Break the monotone
With highway signs
This poem’s kinda wonky
Now that’s a fact
But canola‘s tough to work with
I wish it was flax
Grain Bins
Dotting the landscape
Checkers on a checkerboard
Harvest time: King Me!
Gravel Grid
I traverse the plain on a gravel grid
Left turns, right turns, always perpendicular
A jagged diagonal cutting from highway to highway
Beneath cerulean and cirrus
Six tires kick up dust so fine
It infiltrates the teardrop
I spent months
Making water tight
Small price
To drive through
This sparse, vibrant paradox
Heart of the prairie
A tabletop landscape dotted
With silos, barns and homesteads
Spread widely across the checkerboard
Of wheat, flax, canola and corn
To some, perhaps, a vast empty space
But from this tabletop to yours
Comes the bread
We spread the butter on
Dust ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #349
The pickup passes
Flicking a long tail of dust
Which prairie winds
Spread like golden icing
Across a latent landscape
Under sunset sky
Farmland is always a realm
Of hope and promise
And possibility
While also of heartbreak
And tragedy and ruin
As is any venture reliant
On the whims of nature
A single storm defines
The outcome of an entire season
For good or ill
Is saviour or saboteur
Or, as here, in Empress
No storm comes at all
And the glory of a golden-hour transformation
Only masks the calamity of dust
Prairie Lines
Equal parts land and sky
A gravel grid takes me there
And then afar
The dust kicked up
Wind whisks away
An expanse left sparse
For what good seed may raise
The prairie, where sight lines end
Only at the infinite
The Expanse of Rural Life
An expanse of green
And brown beyond
Soon again to be green
Above
A sky
Promising the gift of rain
A smattering of structures
For shelter, work and storage
All to service the green
Occupants come and go
Seasons of family
And movement
Change
The cycle of life
Plays out in a rural field
Far from city markets
Harvest ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #233
Fields emptied
Silos filled
Soon the loaves
From flour milled
Silos filled
Soon the loaves
From flour milled
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