What catches the eye

what catches the eye
in the wide field's isolation
is a fertiliser-sack whisking in the wind
light blue, dark blue,
on a strung line of baling yarn

the low green crop shows
indeterminately at a distance,
over which the plastic protectively presides,
scrap of would-be humanity,
all surface and no substance,
light and movement coruscating,
to keep death's crows away

(real people cost too much,
their rattling required for football;
scarecrows take too much stuffing
and lack nervous agitation)

dancing alone,
it moves directly to the wind's beat,
with youthfully functional energy;
though it may one day fray
and fly away into a hedge,
it's as indestructible as isotopic waste -
our memorials to be stored, in glass caskets,
under Cleopatra's Needle, or in a hedge-bottom,
for the future to wonder at

at the field's end, a poplar
spreads its branches like blood to the wind's airing,
and half above, half below
thinks downward, thick-skinned, into earth,
registering heat and cold at each bud's pore,
weighing its whole growth and balance:
it would take all its time, and no sooner,
to make just one leaf and flower

deeper still perhaps,
below bare sunless earth,
lies the imponderable, universal
word that may never come, or if it does, be the wrong one -
flapping bravely, worn skin-thin,
let's wait instead
for such a tree, in time, to grow in us,
patient and singular,
gently moved by the wind

© Alec Rapkin