Ghetto Farm Kid

I'm a ghetto farm kid, trapped amid the bustle and noise

Of an urbanity, the hard press of humanity

where I have no choice but to breathe its gasoline fumes,

so different than the smell of diesel,

Wheat, and the hard honest sweat that you get

when your sweeping a bin, or pitching the hay in

On a hot heavy day

I was never meant to be a farmer, to my parents dismay

My course lay instead, in literature, fantasy, the books I had read

They inspired me, widened me, and taught

My mind to ignore the simplicity what lay around

Sowing the ground, the beautiful haunting sound of

A chinook wind, or the sight of hawks hunting in the fields

where the harvest is coming in

And the row of combines marching in the lines

Of swath on a land like quilted cloth

With swatches of green and gold, a pageantry

As old as Cain, who was the first to put hand to the plough

look up at the sky and curse it for its lack of rain

I wanted something more than the duties of the farm chore,

I swore, I would travel, experience more

than the vista of a plain Albertan plain.

I wanted to imbibe the foreign sights and sounds of something other than my tribe

Learn the tongue from the young of another place, chase down and face the

Desire to flee my own space, hearth and home

My feet were itchy, you see?

I scratched that itch, and set them free on a plane trip to Germany

I lived in Berlin, away from my kin, in an city so new and fresh

To my eyes, there was no disguise-ing my newfound love and care

For this city of the Bear

It had an atmosphere, you veritably sense it in the air,

In the clothes that my peers would wear, the mohawk hair

Or the red handkerchief slung round the neck

hung like a flag ready at the beck

And call of a protest at the Berlin Wall

Which had its fall not too long ago at all

You could feel the history in this city,

Sketched underneath the skin of the graffiti tag

Feel it as you touched bullet holes in the Reichstag

From a World War where they exchanged

One dictator for years of cold slow conflict that raged

In this city divided between East and West

You can see it echoed in eyes, hear it in the chest

Of a people who are charged with: Lest WE forget

Auschwitz, Treblinka, Arbeit Macht Frei

You can see it echoed in the eyes

The memories of a people who let the Jews die

But there was a willingness to engage, from the people my age,

In questions political, rhetorical, and cultural,

There was a thirst for debate, a desire to create

A dialogue of mind and thought, a language fraught with

The willingness to encompass more than the limits of

of theology, nationality, and blind ideology

They taught me that it was ok to open my mind

to find conversation late at night in a coffee shop

Open far past the hour of closing

and well on the way to first light

I met the Prof, a man with salt and pepper hair,

Grizzled but with a statesman air,

He used to be an Anglican priest, ordained,

But found he was chained to the bedside

Of the old, and sought to find inside a faith that had died

So he came back to teach English to the senior high,

And to me, this English speaking guy,

A irony I saw and met with a grin, wry

He challenged my concepts, the hardened precepts

of a narrow neo-conservatism, airtight faith, trapped in the chasm

Of propaganda, and as he saw it - Indoctrination,

Opening the mind from the culture I lived in

I had to make the point, No... I'm not an American

So you see, it was trip whose taste left me thirsty

For really good coffee and a company that delights

In the verbal spar, the conversation that ranges wide and far

From the plebeian woes of a city that has no personality

as far as personality goes

It was a good trip for this ghetto farm kid