Election Year
This is a year with no escape
hatch, by July Quackgrass
and Sowthistle hem roadsides,
knee-high weeds root in flinty gravel,
then the flail mower rumbles closer.
Since morning I’ve heard
its approaching drone, ominous
as an enormous hive on high alert,
the sound of swarm fills my ears.
I once thought winter would not pass,
now I wonder if this ludicrous,
over-the-top debacle will ever end?
Summer brings it on, carnival huckster
stoked by a massive infusion of green.
The blizzard comes in autumn this year.
Flail drum blades arrive to shear
thin-skinned saplings into headless pikes,
shave Sweetfern and Yarrow to late-day stubble.
Cut Japanese Knotweed and it returns
with a vengeance, tenacious as black flies
drawn to exhalation for their blood meal.
An ugly business, all this destruction
caused by a flail mower, but without it
roads narrow, and line of sight is gone.
A car needs a shoulder to cry on
when it goes wild, to justify all this ruin,
all this compost spat out and left moldering.
*
Nancy Sobanik is a poet whose work can be found upcoming in Frost Meadow Review, Vol. 12, Triggerfish Critical Review; Sparks of Calliope- Best of The Net Nominee 2023 and Pushcart Nomination 2024; Verse-Virtual; Sheila-Na-Gig; The Ekphrastic Review and ONE ART. She was awarded second place in the Maine Postmark Poetry Festival Contest 2023.
Nice poem Nancy.