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The Farming Blog

Photo by Alistar Harris

The Farming Life

This morning I opened a Google alert to find that this gorgeous farming blog (The Farming Life) had shared my poem “I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast” as part of an inspiring photo essay about their farm. They also quoted an answer I gave Okla Elliott for the magazine “As It Ought To Be”.

I love this farm (Origins) and everything they stand for–sustainability, health, love, service. And seeing farming and poetry come together like this, well, it feeds my heart…

From: This Farming Life
New arugula.

The poetry of the American poet and author, Melissa Studdard, is often spiritual in nature. Her work explores themes of unity, transcendence, divinity, and the human potential, as in her poem I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast. In an interview she reflected on some of her process and philosophy in writing. She says “Like many poets, I often feel compelled to cloister myself in a cave of words—and though that cave may be where the breath of poetry originates, it is not where the body of poetry moves. The body of poetry wants to kneel in the temple, protest in the streets, ramble through open-air markets, dance in clubs, and serve lunch at soup kitchens. Even the most private-seeming poems are not truly private, but, rather, bottled messages sent from the island of self to the world.” Happy Valentine’s to you and yours!

–after Thich Nhat Hanh

It looked like a pancake,
but it was creation flattened out–
the fist of God on a head of wheat,
milk, the unborn child of an unsuspecting
chicken—all beaten to batter
and drizzled into a pan.
I brewed some tea and closed my eyes
while I ate the sun, the air, the rain,
photosynthesis on a plate.
I ate the time it took that chicken
to bear and lay her egg
and the energy a cow takes
to lactate a cup of milk.
I thought of the farmers, the truck drivers,
the grocers, the people
who made the bag that stored the wheat,
and my labor over the stove seemed short,
and the pancake tasted good,
and I was thankful.

Be well, eat healthy, and be kind to yourself and others.

Alistar

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