Thin Grass

This poem is rooted in memories. Ed and I had been divorced from each other for thirty years. When we remarried one another in 2000 Ed was a conventional farmer in Southern Indiana. I was a Northern Illinois suburbanite. But way back in the 1960’s, years before our divorce, I’d accepted the truth in Rodale’s teaching about organic farming.

After Ed developed lymphoma, his eyes began to open-up to how fully conventional chemical farming had depleted his cropland. I printed pages and pages of information from the internet—together we read about how glyphosates affected honey bees — about how they were weakening the trees in the dense old stands of our Indiana woodlands—and about how rains in the Hoosier uplands drained poisons into our creeks and filtered down across the river bottoms to infect our rivers. Going against the local grain, Ed decided to give the cultivated fields a Sabbath rest and stopped using all the chemical fertilizers and herbicides that had sickened both him and the land.

The fields looked dead, barren that first cropless spring. The soil felt inert, not alive. My heart felt pained, sorrowful. Slowly, year by year, gladness came as more and more green-grass grew to cover the land. Seeds of native plants that had lain dormant for decades sprouted into life—sparse at first but thicker and taller each year—until Ed’s old cropland looked as verdant as the pastures. By the third year, grasd was thick enough to turn the cows out into the former fields. Those first years we’d walk the land counting and comparing grasses—fescues, bluegrass, quack grass, rye grass, Johnson grass and more. I’m old now and have forgotten all the names. Ed became a grass farmer. Thin Grass is from those glad days.

Thin grass clings to stingy soil,
shoots rise through hopes unsure.
roots break through with toil.

Covering enough to keep these hills alive
grasses and weeds and clovers grow
with rains, the green survives.

Wild turkeys, rabbits, raccoon, and the deer,
woodchucks and possum multiply here.
At night, we hear coyotes howl,
and softer hoots from distant owls.

One, at times frisky. bull
keeps his herd of calves and cows.
Contented all, they never roam.
this land has all they need, they know.

Moles enough to move a hill
and countless little climbing
crawling, swarming
buzzing, jumping, flying things
know this farm alone as home.

It’s awe-ful pretty—this land.
No buildings break the upland ground
where pastures cover caves in karst*
and grass fills dangerous hollows;
where brambles fill the sinkholes
and bushes rise from drop-offs
just a step beyond the brow of hills.

Will I take root—
in shallow soil on stone and clays
garbed now in greening spring?
Or is it safer in the air—
where eagles soar,
calling me to rise and ride the wind
above this land of hidden holes and surprising washouts
where Johnson grass shoots twelve feet high,
and songbirds feed on thistles,
where herons nest by muddy rivers,
and copperheads still hide,
where raptors soar and dive
finding far more rodents
than they need to thrive.

Could I plant a garden here—
go no more abroad?
Work with compost, build up loam,
leave legacies of thickening sod
rebuild this soil to grow a home?

**In karst topography, water dissolves the underlying sedimentary rock; the ground surface is insecure. It erodes so easily that seemingly solid-surface-ground may unexpectedly give way to new sinkholes or open into cave-like hollows below. Driving a tractor into a new and hidden sinkhole is no fun. A farmer learns to walk his land and never do it again. Beneath the surface there may be springs, caverns and tunnels. Once, after a heavy rain, when my husband and I were driving a farm utility vehicle along a familiar path to a wild berry patch, we saw a new sinkhole barely in time to swerve away. Under hard rain the surface soil broke apart. Clumps of sod, grass and all, lay in the mud at the bottom of an almost six-foot-deep hole wider as wide as our utility vehicle. Although the chances of anyone else traveling that way were close to nothing, stopping to mark the hole with a tree branch and a temporary flag (my husband’s shirt) was more important than berry picking. I could have made a home there, in that Southern Indiana land.