On Saturday I attended Jone MacCulloch’s Poetry Pop-up Salon by Zoom. We were all familiar with each other through our poetry blogging and easily settled in to write. Something about writing in community creates magic. Everyone had a poem to share around Jone’s chosen word prompt, “harvest.”
At this time of year in New Iberia, sugarcane is being harvested and ground. Many people don’t like this season. The sugarcane trucks slow down traffic flow. The smoke from the mills and the burning of the fields aggravates allergies. And there’s the bagasse smell that makes you think you stepped in dog poop. But to me, it means fall. Cooler temperatures and sweet air.
Yesterday as the sun was going down, I was delivering food to a friend down the country roads, so I stopped to take some photos of the cane fields. I didn’t get a shot of the big dinosaur-like harvesters, and I was swatting at swarming gnats, but I loved the light of the autumn sun falling down the fields.
Harvest
Before humidity drops,
before leaves fall,
before the day lowers itself to comfort levels,
sugarcane harvesters gear up—
their dinosaur maws suck up
spit out husks of tall grass—
work once done by strong backs
and torn hands of Africans,
now mechanized and modern.
Soon fires will blaze
in plowed rows, smoke rising
like ancestral ghosts toward
an autumn sky.
Sweetness comes at a cost.
Harvester heaves and leaves behind
a field, fallow and fertile.
Margaret Simon, draft
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