Song Of the Weedicide Freedom

SONG OF THE WEEDICIDE FREEDOM - ( Weeds )

(After a return to the family farm and an attempt to turn traditional farming
methods into an organic and spray-chemical free one.)

WEEDS!
..............Thick Weeds.
.....................................Damn Weeds!

Weeds love a market garden.

Look at the rows of sweetcorn!

Where?
Is it a lawn of fat fan?
Wild radish?
Or a good crop of
Prince-of-Wales feather?

Sweetcorn ?
How tell it from Johnson grass?
Oh I see!
The corn does have larger leafblades.

What’s that?
Pigweed? Portulacca?
Looks innocent!
Looks like spinach!

All weeds?
Seedling weeds.

Weeds!
Careful!
Pull weeds sideways from the plants,
Watch for the vegetables!
Use you eyes to hoe.

Look! Here’s a sweetcorn plant

Watch Out!
EYES!

........Eyes.

Use the hoe like a razor on your face
You are the edges of the blade.

So! Raze the feather!
Slice wild radishes!
Cut grassroots
And bare the earth!

Only
regret
the weedseed
riddled in the soil,

Weeds come again
Again!
Weeds love a market garden.

Weeds!
Can capsicums compete?
Will beans be choked?

But... weeds can be vegetables
(Plants out of place!)

You’d grow them,
except they
grow themselves...

Prince-of-Wales feather
sprouts like headhairs

(be a good crop if you’d sown it!)

So, Pluck the young seedlings up
Gather them in bunches
Good double handfuls
Tie them with a string...
Call it: Greek Spinach!

Call it: Amaranthus Greens
Sell a few!
make some cash bucks on the side
WELL!

Tell yourself
‘It’s good to be in “Food Production”.

Weeds love a market garden
Weeds do well.

So don’t mistake scotch thistles
for cucumbers
when the soft cotyledons
first push through.

Weeds love a market garden.

WEEDS!
Will the sweetcorn revive?
Will the Fat-Hen that got away
in the tomatoes harbour too many slugs?

Are grubs
breeding in that flowering
wild radish?
Flowers?
Pink and Cream?
Pity you can’t bunch them to sell!

Weeds!

Feather spikes turn thorns
Your wrists take the punishment
Your shoulders ache

You bend
You kneel,
You kneel to weed...
HAND WEED!

You cut to the edges of your blade

And the earth you hoe
makes a new
Seed bed!
For WEEDS
.......,,..........weeds
.............................weeds.


by Wayne David Knoll © 1991


Is freedom from poison to a curse? Original sin was said to carry work and weeds with it in consequence. The weedicides and poisons of the late twentieth century come out of a fascist ruthlessness, seeking similarly final solutions for problems that we have to learn to live with. For there are also human weeds, but who is to decide which. Hitler's cronies thought they knew. The master story teller told of leaving the tares in the wheatfield till the judgement of harvest day, but then, row crops can be weeded with a knife or careful hoe, whether dutch or goosneeck. The hoe sounds its rhythm in ironic strikes. This was written remembering the consequences of returning to the family farm to do it organically. No environmental answer is easy. But the music of manual labour does become a song, and here is an embryonic symphony of words for that libretto.