Another of Omanson's narrative poems, "The Discarded Stone," published in Small Farmer's Journal

 

        Though it is nearly impossible to place a longish narrative poem in a literary journal, not only due to considerations of space, but as well to a certain longstanding bias against narrative poems generally and long poems in particular-- that bias seems not to have carried over to the agricultural sector of our culture.  Or so we are led to conclude, given that two such poems by BJ Omanson, in the space of a single week, were accepted by two agricultural magazines.  

         Both poems are from his regionalist collection, Stark County Poems.  The first was "The Itinerant" which appeared in the Amish publication Farming Magazine, out of New Hope, Ohio, while the second,  "The Discarded Stone," appeared in Small Farmer's Journal, out of Sisters, Oregon.  Our thanks to both editors, David Kline & Lynn Miller, for taking in Omanson's two refugee poems, giving them some hot soup and putting a roof over their heads.

Excerpt:

       It shouldn’t have been there, but there it was,

a nineteenth-century gravestone partly

exposed at the edge of a rubbish pile

back in the woods.  He assumed some farmer

had finally had his fill of always

having to skirt an abandoned plot

of graves that no one had tended for years.

Perhaps he had struck a half-buried slab

with his cultivator and broken a tine

and, perhaps, after cursing and counting costs,

he had hauled away every stone on the site

and plowed it all under. And now, some years

or decades later, this exiled stone

had come to light in a wooded ravine

without a clue as to where it belonged.

He spent the afternoon digging it out,

using his big Shire mare and a rope

to dislodge and drag it up to the road.

With a neighbor’s help he stood it on end

and hoisted it up on the wagonbed

       where, once he had hauled it back to the farm,

       he spent a good hour scrubbing it clean,

       or as clean as he could make it, at least,

       which wasn’t very.  After so long

       in the ground, white marble is less than white

       and no amount of hard scrubbing with soap

       and a stiff-bristled brush will bring it back,

       but he did his best.  The head of the stone

       was another matter, with a scrolled edge

       and a single lily carved in relief—

       it was almost translucent where the sun

       had bleached it to whiteness over the years.

       Such graceful feminine lines bespoke

       a woman still in the bloom of her life,

       or perhaps a child.  Whatever her name,

       the autumn rains had erased it long since,

       as well as the dates, except for the year

       of 1811, which, given the stone’s

       Victorian style, he took to be

       the year of her birth.  And as to where

       the marker should go, he knew just the place:

       a fieldstone wall he had built years ago

to enclose the garden of his late wife

and protect it from any wandering sheep

or cattle that might have slipped through a gap

in the pasture fence.  Guiding his mare

by her bridle, he pulled the wagon in close

to the garden gate, then inclined the stone

slowly and carefully down, and leaned it

against the wall, just under the boughs

       of an old apple tree.  . . .