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Harrowing
by Catherine Chandler
Non est ad astra mollis e terris via. (Seneca)
For Pennsylvania
Her teeming, fertile acres may supply
the world with barley, winter wheat and rye;
but there are other, barren, untilled lands,
for reasons every farmer understands.
It’s best to let the bullets, blood and bones
lie undisturbed beneath the soil and stones;
to let the buttercups and meadow-grass
blanket the savagery as seasons pass.
Harvest-time in Shanksville, Nickel Mines
and Gettysburg spills over county lines.
No fences here to keep one out or in;
no gleaners search for hair or teeth or skin.
Yet constellations nightly sow their light
on heaven’s fallow fields of anthracite.
Catherine Chandler’s poetry has been published in numerous print and online journals and anthologies in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia. She has recently been featured in Able Muse, The Centrifugal Eye, Sonnetto Poesia and The HyperTexts. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee and two-time finalist in the Nemerov Sonnet competition, Catherine is the author of two Chapbooks, For No Good Reason (2008) and All Or Nothing (2010), both from Olive Press.
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Pat Jones
Published 20 May 2010