A Farmer’s Veterans Day Poem

Veterans Day

history’s blood shed
brings us all to this moment
to choose a new dream

enemy revealed
as a man much more in need
of brotherly love

hardest row to hoe
is any row in a field
sewn only with weeds

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This poem is from my recently begun, new notebook, having submitted worthy and well-worked poetry from the other filled and falling apart notebooks in manuscript form. This poem is what is a series of linked “american” haiku or micropoetry.

If you like this poem check out my other Selected New Poems on my blog or consider the eBook or paperback purchase of my book, span (Rhizome Publishing 2011, 2012) which is a collection of Human Ecology* poems from 2000-2010.

*Human ecology is the subdiscipline of ecology that focuses on the human niche. Broadly speaking, it is a study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments: anthropogenic biomes called anthromes within which are habitats connected by road networks to create what has been called technoecosystems.  Human Ecology has a wide territory and manifesting in geography, sociology, psychology, anthropology, zoology, and natural ecology. It is my hope that my poetics can be seen to have contributed to this spectrum by adding literature, biography and ontology to this list.

New Review: Poet James E. M. Smith on Span

 

“Historically, the natural world that we take for granted and that surrounds us closer than we think has been a gratifying subject for poets ever since the third century. The ancient Greeks wrote their `idylls’ – praising the virtues of simple rural life.Most notably the Transcendentalists – Thoreau, Muir, Emerson and Whitman among them realised the negative drain of politics and religion on a community and instead focused their attentions on the unity of man and nature, believing a simple life lived in natural surroundings achieving self-sufficiency was the key. Their poetry went beyond the painting of pretty pictures, it wasn’t all about seasons and birdsong and expressing romantic sentiments – indeed it touched on the transcendental.

In Span, David A. Martin is continuing the exploration, holding back the grasses of uncharted territory, showing us the interconnectedness – the ever changing complex relationship of man and nature as we move through this new century. What he does is quite miraculous. Here we have a writer who can broach this vulnerability, at times even confronting our occupation/destruction of it as the human race but do so in a way that is deft and urgent without being sentimental or sanctimonious.

 

To pigeonhole Martin as simply a nature poet isn’t going to encompass what is on offer here in this collection.

 

Early on in `the apple tree’ we learn there were many things that he had hitherto kept to himself. This is the perfect start – each successive poem serves as a revelation or insight of some sort.

 

Evidently Martin is equally at home writing acorn tight three line poems as well as the sprawling streams of forty-liners.

 

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