A farm is not an esthetic

It is not gingham table covers

Or neutral tone dresses and pedicured toes with babies around your feet

It is sun cracked hands with soil running in every line

Tomato ripe like the blood in your veins

It is in the way the farmers can feel the frost in their bones

Before it ever glazes over strawberry leafs

Or the smell of snapped green beans forever in your nose

The thud of them landing solid in an old Lowe’s bucket

A farm is my ancestors, my uncle and papaw

That taught me how to till soil

And how to properly shuck corn

Brad that taught me how to peel a potato with gentle hands

Bill that taught me how to spot ginseng in the hills behind the garden

I still see their hands casting seeds like holy water to the land

And now I carry this legacy

Pulling weeds and sewing hope

Hot heat on my back

The coolness of a spring wind

Whispering to me that

They still live through the sprouting

Of life from earth