Soul Farm

You dug deep furrows
in my encrusted attitudes,
plowed old layers loose,
lifting brain-clods to the sun.

What hope is there
for struggling seeks
without honesty slicing
complacency into rows?

Overturned from moist darkness
are habits, old mulch,
with recent stubble,
excess, plowed under.

My stubborn field is tear-soaked,
barren, except for your furrows
in fresh-opened rows and
tractor-treads across my heart.

Soul-farmer, what do you see?
Endless barrenness ahead?
Or row by row, as you work,
seedlings in the spring?

From one end of attitudes
to the other of my self,
my monolithic surface is
broken up, broken down.

The length and breadth of me
are deeply plowed, disturbed
into new ordering, soul rows
readied one by one.

Peggy S. Block
Voice, 1996