Farmlands, Ceres, and a Poem

The urban farm returns us to the ancient tasks of planting and weeding with the sun warming our backs.  The idea of a farm requires a community, or a family unit at the very least. Solo you could starve and the more members the more you can grow.  Kingsolver in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" describes the year she and her family went local- eating almost exclusively from a 50 mile radius around their farm.  The now popularity of raising your own animals and slaughtering them is definitely not to everyone's taste.  Who would have thought the way I was raised in my combination Latvia/Varysbury farm would now serve as a model way to live?  Not that I'd want to repeat it.  I'd go vegetarian first.
There are some farms so remote in rural Spain that, as a friend put it, even with a family you're lonely.  That won't happen at the Cold Springs Urban Farm with volunteers digging and planting on Thursdays and Sundays.

Uncovering

Cells capture

the ancient rhythms of

the cycles of  Ceres.

A shovel of dirt unearths

A  moving mass of red ants,

the squiggle of fat worms.

In a Russian dasha

I’d uncover Stalin’s roses,

the corpses rising

after winter’s thaw.

Here, bricks and rocks

of a city once alive,

where lunch pail in hand,

workers lined up for the bus

that still runs on a near empty Main Street

save for a Delta Sonic carwash

and revival temples

promising God’s salvation.

It’s what remains

of my city

turned into a garden lot.