Dad Poet Society

When Galsworthy’s Herr Gessler stopped making boots by hand,
a craftsman’s loving quality vanished from his land.
When farmers in the Midwest stopped raising flax for gain,
a crop whose claim was quality succumbed to lesser grain.
For beauty in its blossom, for seeds one loved to feel,
all other grains were faking it, for only flax was real.

The tender twelve-inch fern-like shoots couldn’t stand in herbicide,
so once each June we’d form a crew to stem the mustard tide.
We’d walk for hours mustarding, shuffling as we went
to keep our feet from leaving plants irrevocably bent.
We’d proudly gaze back as we went to check the changing hue:
what once was yellow, coarse, and rank was now a gentle blue.

When once again the flax could breathe, its growth instincts took hold,
and all we had to do was wait the harvest of the gold.
We’d check by rolling ball-shaped husks ’tween palms till seeds were freed.
The wind would blow the chaff away, revealing liquid seed.
All our senses we’d employ: taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight,
until the time that it was clear our flax was now just right.

Pure flaxseed runs like water and seeks its level true,
so before we brought the harvest in, some chores were yet to do:
We’d seal up every hole and crack in wagon box and bin,
for watertight they had to be to keep the liquid in.
With cautious care and careful pride our combine swept the field;
with loving satisfaction we contained our brown-gold yield.

The straw we baled with boyish joy, spurred by that tale of old
where in one rumpled silk-skin spun flax straw to purest gold.
The bales we hauled to town to sell and loaded on the train.
At Peavey’s plant our liquid gold was mixed with others’ grain.
We never saw those seeds again, unless by some fate chance
they showed up in the seed we bought for drilling next year’s plants.

As life becomes more technical, the gentle things depart.
When beans and corn replaced flax, they chased away the heart
of what had been a gentle time of brownish golds and blues,
of mustard flower and blossom power and magic boyhood views.
But still I see the waving fields and feel the cool, dark touch
of what I know of tenderness. The flax has taught me much.