Walking down to the barn
to check on our last ewe to lamb this season.
Looking up. Full moon. Clear. Dark.
Looking down.
My flashlight shears through the hoarfrost grass.
Revealing.
There it is, an original sin.
A pair of cuts running north-south across the pasture.
They are plow lines or, rather, the scars of plow lines.
It had been a tobacco planting bed
before it had been disked and harrowed into a seed bed.
Fifty years abandoned.
Unforgivable.
Unforgiven.
Perhaps the only clean slate offered by the land, Perhaps the only lasting absolution
will come from an advancing glacier,
scraping past the scars,
down to the bone.
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I feel your tenderness for the land. This poem also reminded me of my dismay when each of my children, as tiny tots, acquired their first scar, and how heartbroken I was that these perfect bodies were forever marred. I think there are numerous lessons here.
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I am happy you are reminded of other scars. The power of language is often rooted in something we think of as counterproductive–ambiguity.
There is a hidden language of scars
known only to those who loved us first
and then later by other who loved us, too.
Lovers tracing them out
and memorizing and mapping them,
but in the end
never knowing what keening
their mother knew
at their origin.
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How many times over the past 60 – 200 million years might glaciers and other natural events erased the land of its previous history, then created a new slate for the next so-called civilization to write on?