Counting For Nothing

COUNTING FOR NOTHING

(or - The farm signed me )

First Monday of

every month
I must spend a day uselessly

in town
Have five coffees

with the accountant
From

Acres Accounting Limited!

We do-over

last month's debt reserve
Go over next months tallies,

draughts, live-weights,
And I get my orders,

with Guides for Futures
plus meagre Stipend

and Household Support!

Going in I drive

all the way past farms
like mine

-I mean like not-mine-
[Mortgages bought up
by

Acres Accounting Limited! ]

I took years

to sign to quit the farm
but the farm signed me
Left me here
with a hollow heirloom
a tenant for history

with the lemon tree

by the chookpen
which lets its bitterness here.

Here,

where there is no family farm
but the only life I know.

I am owned

by the produce I sold.
I meet

the bailiff of the paper baron
And he tells me

what to sow,

where to reap
and how much

of the paper

I can keep.

I am under

the screw of thumbs
a fate
which my great-grandparents

left Germany
to escape.

I am an untold peasant
In an unsaid feudalism
And all my practical thrift

and ingenuity
- that spare economy

counts for nothing
on economist's

paper.


1992 © Wayne David Knoll

Economies of scale now run us off the land and unbalance us off the human scale of feeling. Everyone but the very rich is becoming landless and placeless, unless it is a pocket hankerchief morsel of trod-on dirt. This poem was written after travelling through the Riverina and meeting farmers on the edge of the bank doors. It was inspired by a story in the Melbourne 'Age' newspaper. In the Campaspe valley I discovered the early thatched-roof inplement sheds, and straw-roofed fooder shelters of our past, of settlers who built with what they had to hand. The family farmers made and built in and of the landscape to make this land rich and more productive, more sheltering as a home, than it had ever been before. Creativity with landscape is a poetic ingenuity which gives many life. Whereas, economy with landscape is that mercenary snake-oil spin which also kills with the venom of its fear and sefishness. Economics kills the country; belief makes the country live. It is generosity and philanthropic stewardship and commitment which makes the country come alive.