Going over my first small booklet of poems, Lectio Lyrica I, published early in 2025, I came across “Winter Wheat.”
I have been thinking about writing a personal memoir (mine) in verse; and reading this poem, I realized that it contains many important movements:
Being sown in the upper Midwest, where farming was an important backdrop to both branches of my family
The goodness and generosity, the prodigality even, of the sowers in my story, mainly parents and grandparents
The “blizzard” of my midlife, in which I “misspent” so much of this seed
The blessing of the seed’s “vernalization,” its dormancy during “forty years in the wilderness”
Its “breaking soil” with my return to Christian worship as a Catholic in 2007
My debt to forebears for “the things I am today”
Sadness over the rising generation, which knows no “analog land,” only a virtual reality offered by “screens that would kill them”
Here’s the poem again:
Winter Wheat
It’s primal, not to see the seed
whose sowing set my feet
in acreage on which today
I stand, speak, sway.
It fell before I had my sight.
I was sown and grown at night.
A summer child of ’51,
I came to life upon
the farms of my fathers, fed by wheat
sown prodigally at their feet:
seeds of family, faith, fortune,
and prayer, more than my portion.
This seed sustained a field scoured
by blizzard, misspent hours.
Its winter-long germination
stayed my ruination.
Long to vernalize, in ’07
it broke soil for heaven.
The things I am today all owe
their being here to those
who gave me good ground and sowed it,
fed, watered, hoed it,
toiling a generation to raise
a crop not crazed.
What distant famine awaits us all
from sown fields virtual—
no analog land, no seed,
just pixels of greed
disseminated to our children
by screens that would kill them?
