Poetry & Wheat

I took off driving at the end of this rather long day. I was searching for sunflowers; a jaunt earlier today, to a patch I photographed last summer, had proven unsuccessful this time around, so I decided to try to find the spot where a friend of mine had seen some last year.

Again: No sunflowers.

This time of year, though, I am rarely completely disappointed.

Tonight, I found some wheat fields, and it was almost as if I had discovered gold.

“It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.” — From The Little Prince, Chapter 21

(I was going to link to the text, online, but I attempted to do so and somehow managed to fuck up my computer for approximately 20 minutes; however, if you have not yet read this book, do so immeDIately, if not sooner.)



Twenty years ago, I wrote this poem:

Farm Boy

From his tenth-floor office
window
he peers out at the concrete structures
around him. For the first time,
he notices
that the snow has all melted, almost

time to plant the beans, he
muses, fingering the prized pin
in his vest pocket.
“Future Farmers of America,” it says.

His thoughts wander to a place in his past ...

the Farm
prime land, 200 acres in central Illinois
where golden sheets of wheat
shimmered and rolled
while corn tassels, slightly withered, waved at
the Boy
perched on his daddy’s John Deere,
a cattail clenched
between his teeth

... then snap back to the present
his future.

He squashes the Marlboro and shoves it
into a sand-filled
ashtray. Sighing, he slams
his fist against the desk, his
boyhood dreams lost
or misplaced
among the paperwork.

— DLW
© The Vehicle, Fall 1985



I thought of those words I had written so many years ago. I wrote this poem in Beth Kalikoff’s creative writing class — it was done as part of an assignment in which we had to come up with a list of random words, and then, from that list, we had to use, like, 10 of those words in a poem. After we shared the poem with the class, we could revise as we wished, deleting all of the list words if we wanted to.

I do not remember which list words remained in my final draft (if you can even call this a final draft; I still found myself wanting to revise as I typed the poem on here just now!), but for some reason, I am thinking “concrete” and “vest” and “ashtray” might have been somewhere on that list.

I grew up in a small town, in the heart of farm country; however, I know virtually nothing about farming. Oh, I can tell you the difference between a tractor and a combine (pronounced “KAHM-bine,” for any of you city slickers who think I meant “kum-BINE”!), and I have learned more than I want to know about soybean rust from putting together a weekly farm page, but I have not spent much time on a farm.

So, why did I choose to write a poem about a farm — or, rather, a farm boy?

Who knows. Something about that list o’ words just sent me off on that tangent, I guess.

Besides, this piece was actually about my father. Who, for the record, was neither an executive nor a farmer ... and didn’t smoke Marlboros, either, at least not in my younger days, when Debra and I used to get him a carton of smokes for his birthday and major holidays. (By the way: When I bought gas tonight, I noticed on a sign outside the store that said a carton of Marlboros costs $32.59. Yet another reason I am thankful I never took up smoking — or, more accurately, that my attempts at smoking never actually “took.”)

My father was a mailman who would have preferred to spend his time tinkering with electronic gadgets: TVs, stereos, CB radios. He never owned a computer, though, and he died a few years before the Internet ever got going.

His job was a good one, but he hated it. Always felt as if he could have/should have been doing more.

Maybe what he really needed was a camera.