Stones and Wildflowers

I watched them work. Pickaxes swung down, rakes drug, shovels dug, wheelbarrows brimming with stone hauled for drowning in the bay; land softened for tilling and cultivating of seed. Ash flitted from iron drums placed on the farm’s paths lined by torrid, smoking barrel fires, which farmhands could not approach.

“There is no need for the rubble,” the Farmer tasked his hired hands, “nor is there room for the weeds. Prune that dreck from the wheat.”     He directed his left hand over acres of wildflowers with stolon roots lingering outside the City nestled at a cobblestone wall where hired feet cross with spores of weeds clung to tattered clothes. The wildflowers ripened garish-laced blooms—mottling the Farmer’s grange—their presence scorched the farm under the sun.

The farmhands beheld beauty in treacherous roots. In the sun their spirits resisted the hoe, the shaft struck abrasions in their palms, the wood as coarse stone and cumbersome, the tool heads wobbled unbalanced and heavy with their swings.

Murmuring in dry air they asked, “What harm are wildflowers that we should remove them?” but the Farmer heard their grumbling and ordered again,     “There’s no room for weeds: their color a sham, their aroma bait; only flowers and only wheat. There’s no room for weeds gorging on the syrup of earthworms, withering the top soil meant to nourish crops. Burn them in the drums.”