The Farmer’s Crop
What is the color of rain? You feel it on your face,
It drowns you, your senses, and you feel it no more,
Walking, no, straining, through the muddy field,
The farmer’s house, a window light, a post light outside,
Then no light as the rain comes over the hill,
Through the gray sagebrush, subsuming the hill and house
As it had the mountain, and your too young
Legs churning the mud as the lightning quickens
Your brother is up ahead, never looking back,
You guess because he rarely looks back,
He is the stalwart one father left in charge,
Said to stay in the field until the rain got bad –
No he didn’t say that. No he didn’t. But we know
That is what he does. He stays in the field
Until the rain gets bad. Till you are drenched,
Till the field is mud. Till you can no longer work
To save the farmer’s crop, because that is what you do.
______________
Zeke Sanchez
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
A feeling of entrapment seeps through the closing lines, a constriction, a weight, a duty that defies personal logic and freedom. This is the ghost of inheritance: responsibility, masculinity, memory, passed down like a burden. We push through mud and downpour, caught in a lineage of stoic endurance. Rain becomes more than weather – it is a metaphor for what cannot be rinsed away. Obligation lingers in the air, even when no one names it. What, or who, is the crop? Is it me or the will of the father made flesh?