[Newspoetry] poem

[Anne Bargar]

We've been out here for hours,

digging carrots out of cool, black soil.  Wind gusts through bare branches
as the afternoon air starts to cool down.  Looking up from the carrots,
across the landscape, there is little color left on the trees a mile away.
Karina, at the end of the row, is singing in Spanish, and the wind kindly
brings the sound over to me.  My brain has sprung a small leak.  A voice
from the back of the head wishes to attend an anti-war protest tomorrow,
but the frontal lobe knows darn well that the post-market nap will happen.
That voice never quite shuts up, and the earthworms emerging from the
clods I flick off  carrots beg me to help protect their soil-bourne
brethren across the globe.  As I dig more carrots, pulling them straight
up to prevent them from breaking, I try to explain that congress abdicated
its right to say no to war.  And then the scumbags wanted my vote to stay
in office.  I apply leverage to the digging fork and gently pry my ballot
off the punchcard machine, having said "HELL NO!"  Organic matter should
have the right to declare war, because it won't roll belly up every time
the president crosses his eyes at it.  100% of earthworms agree that Hairy
Vetch should be elected to congress, and that's a candidate I could sure
get behind.

I brush the soil off a fat carrot to find two, wrapped around each other.
Pulled apart, they retain a rigid spiral shape.  Unsellable, they clean
off nicely for for a tasty, frost-enhanced snack.  We could grow all the
carrots we need here in the Midwest, because were guaranteed frost and
California isn't, and then we wouldn't have to use that oil we have to go
to war for to ship them out east.  But that would make sense, and
cross-country shipping has turned Senatorial tops yellow, just how the
president likes them.  So, why should I feel guilty for sleeping through
the war protest because I'm butt-tired after the market, when the people
who could have stopped another pointless war chickened the fuck out?
We applied leverage, and rewarded those who stood up on their own with
votes and retained seats.  Those that stayed in the mud got snapped in
half when the president yanked them out at a sharp angle.  I look
at my row of pulled carrots, waiting to have their tops snapped off, and I
see them carrying protest signs, and know I'll join them again,
eventually.

The sky puts on a brilliant show as we leave, with bright orange morphing
to red leaping out from behind thin grey clouds.  The sunset takes up the
whole sky, and the sound of the wind must now compete with the noise
Karina and I are making about how great the sky is.