Thursday, October 1, 2009

Song for Butterbeans

I wrote this when I was seventeenish. It won a prize, which went to my head. Later the Agnes Scott literary magazine foolishly took it, encouraging me further, and and thus you find me here years later a broken wretch of a creature, teaching Freshman Comp and still writing poetry as well as committing fiction on a regular basis. Behold my late adolescent poetic sensibilities, complete with inexplicable line breaks, erratic punctuation, and whimsical rhymes. Actually, judging by some of my recent stuff, neither the inexplicability, erraticity*, nor whimsy have changed all that much...

Song for Butterbeans

Heat rises from damp earth,
add my own humidity
I, a country girl, pick
With embarrassing unfluidity.
Green smell: “Pod No.5”
hundred eighty million
Will I make it alive
To the end of the row?
Vines leafed brown lace
Wrap around my ankle,
The Bean From Outer Space
Attacks stealthily: Beware!
Butterbeans with nearby green entwined
Like cousin lovers hid behind
A ragged screen of weeds I find
Tomatoes do not care.
My whole body itches. Dive bombed
By bumblebees seeking morning glory and such,
I like butterbeans.
But not that much.



*Yes, I do believe I made that word up. Wanna make something of it?