The Harrow

The Harrow

Gary Allison Furr

 

In the years I lived among the peanut farmers,

I breathed October dust and prayed for their harvests.

The church and all of the town waited for the yield,

To tell us what sort of year it would be.

Only a few restaurants, drugstores and movie rental places

No movie theaters, theme parks or malls,

But we had a John Deere tractor dealership out on the bypass

Where the farmers’ trucks had to pass by.

On the most prominent corner, right by the road

the latest double wheel model

with the air-conditioned cab and stereo system.

Plowing without dust and sweat! Hard to imagine

we were so far from the farmers with their mules in the old days,

on a forty-acre farm, working like the Devil to survive

lest the mule be repossessed or die.

 

But always there was the harrow, evolved from ancient times,

At first, only a tree branch, sharpened to punch open the ground,

The Romans first made them of iron to mass produce

And now they are rows of teeth or knives neatly arranged

Or deadly discs, sharp enough to kill a man, but modern

in their symmetry of tearing open the earth,

They rip open the crust so the seed can go deep, down

Into the moist fertility, then burst open and seek the light above.

 

“Harrowing” is near-death, danger, all our protection

Torn away from us, some sharp and deadly threat

Gashes open the layers of careful habit and insulation

until death and I stare back at one another

waiting for one of us to make a move.

 

The medieval Christians said that on Saturday Jesus,

Punched down under the tomb, all the way to the underworld

and preached to the souls in hell.

He led out all those who had no chance to know Easter,

Satan, surely, filed an immediate lawsuit against God

for breaking the rules and letting a dead man breach the underworld

to claim souls Satan thought were a sure thing.

“The Harrowing of Hell” was kept in the Creed

We shake our heads

at the primitive believer thinking He “descended into hell”

Even as we still survive by eating the bounty of earth’s puncture wounds.

Farmers still dig down to the only place where life can emerge.

We are deluded by surface coverings of asphalt and wireless noise

“Virtual” cannot feed the hungry or raise the dead.

For that, earth must be broken, hearts pierced, nails driven.

 

Down went the Son of God, into Hell itself.

I’d like to think a little disc-plowing is called for,

Some holes punched in hell still on this earth,

Right through hard-hearted souls who deny

there is anything under here worth looking at or saving.

I’d like to think the Son of God, even in the grave,

Cannot help but vanquish every poison weed and pestilence

that threatens the Garden that God put here for us all.