If Human Beings Are Battlefields
If Human Beings Are Battlefields
“Human Landscape” Bardic Poetry by Joseph S. Plum
A note about the poet…Dad had a pretty big health scare recently. He ended up in the emergency room in Knoxville and was taken by ambulance to Mercy Hospital in Des Moines for emergency surgery. He’s now recovering and on his way back to wellness. He wanted me to express his sincere gratitude to all the kind and talented nurses and doctors who saved his life, both in Knoxville and DSM. And to his friend, Pat, and all who have been by his side through this ordeal - he is grateful.
A heartfelt thank you from this grateful daughter as well.
Welcome:
Greetings and welcome to American Bardic Poet.
“Human Landscape”
This week’s poem is a section from the longer series titled, “Human Landscape.” I chose this particular section because I’ve always loved the line, “if human beings are battlefields / then we must become overgrown with weeds.” I remember coming home from a long journey overseas during college and looking out at the meadow surrounding our rural Iowa homestead, wondering if being so free of conflict…that we turn into meadows…is what Dad meant. I can still feel the Iowa wind on my face when I read these lines.
Good journey,
(The poet’s daughter.)
human landscape
if human beings
are battlefields
then we must become
overgrown with weeds
so all the bodies
that have died
but were never buried
can turn now into flowers
who will someday be
dropping all their seeds
for if the sun is rising
to chase away the dark
then very soon the inner earth
will again be warming
as these clouds of blindness
begin again to part
and the gods of war
who have been forever fighting
shall find a new conflict
visited upon their hearts
a conquest who struggles
end in silence, alone,
amid their own world’s
highest mountain tops
by living in a human landscape
with choices to be made
the price of healing
wounded innocence
is never quite completely paid
unless the geometry
of the situation grows honestly
from a matrix born
of instinctive faith
so that the opportunity
to strike a reflex blow
in the name of glory
can, without hesitation
be ultimately allowed
to escape.
Read about the poet and the bees here.
Read my post regarding punctuation and editing of the poems here.
Read the poem, “the sun has traveled well” here.
This is a page from the book, I Believe in Seeds: Affirmations for Rewilding, made possible by a grant from the BeWildReWild Fund at Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation. This book combines my watercolor paintings with Dad’s poems, and gave me a chance to try something different with punctuation. Also, it was such a beautiful moment when Dad saw my paintings and realized his poems were part of his daughter’s artwork.
I’m grateful.
I’ll write more next week. Hope to see you again then. Please consider sharing this post with someone you think may be interested in Dad’s poetry.
🙏🏼 Thank you for gathering here. May it be a blessing. 🙏🏼
About the Poet
Joseph S. Plum is a poet in the bardic tradition. He lives off-grid in rural Iowa and composes his unique chant-like oral poetry for fascinated audiences around the world. Joe has over 16 hours of oral poetry memorized in his head. He pulls from this collection of rhyming lines to compose poems according to the energy of the audience listening. Joe does all of this without writing the poems down on paper or holding any notes.
Joe’s daughter, Emily Lupita, typed up his poems over the years and launched Dreaming Deer Press to publish his work. He now has nine poetry books for sale on Amazon that can be purchased on Joe’s website - here.
🌳