Gleaning Song

This entry is part 84 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

These are registers on the staff
of days: grains of dust that gather

like vellum in summer, the high and lazy
whirring of ceiling fans. Drifts of yellow

petals falling from the tulip trees, pitch
and warble of birds. Gather and gather,

lisp the ants and worker bees; pluck
and scour. The season lilts like a song

working the route to its coda. Lyric by lyric
the mouth learns the intricate passages:

where the rests are, and the furrows.

About

Via Negativa is a unique experiment in daily, poetic conversation with the living and the dead. Dave Bonta founded the site in 2003 and Luisa A. Igloria joined in 2010. Guest authors contribute as well. Dave writes daily erasure poems to discover the poetry hidden in the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Luisa has been writing and posting a poem a day since November 2010, often in response to Dave’s entries at The Morning Porch. Collections of poems first published at Via Negativa include Luisa’s The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser, and Dave’s Ice Mountain and Breakdown: Banjo Poems. Read more…

Albert B. Casuga says:

June 13, 2011 at 1:57 pm

Lyric by lyric/ the mouth learns the intricate passages:/where the rests are, and the furrows.

THE GLEANER’S SONG

When the gleaners stretch their backs at sundown
among the terraces, they troll their ditties of work,
and throw their jute sacks on their sunburnt backs:

“Where the heavens meet the sea, O Kannoyan,
Where the pinetrees sway with the wind dance,
We will be there, we shall gather the roots, gather

the banana leaves to wrap the broiled mudfish,
and bring them home, bring them home, to hold
the feast at eventide, to burn venison in campfire.

O, Old Kannoyan, we praise you with our songs,
we pray with our flaccid hands that in the morrow
will be strong, we bless you with our gleaner’ song.”

At sunrise, they will be there again to trace roots
that lace the furrows of ancient soil, where fathers
have found their forebears’ lair laden with lore

about the worksongs of the native braves, tillers
of the softened clay, hunters of the ripened hills
where wild boars roamed with the dappled deer.

I will learn these songs, sing these songs, until
every passage, every word, shall have become
my martial beat and the quiet lullaby of my soul.

—Albert B. Casuga
06-13-11

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