The Heron's Nest

Editors' Choices

The Heron's Nest Award

We have seen time and again that haiku can be marvelous vehicles for transporting a reader, quickly, to another place. In Marilyn Appl Walker's monoku, we are transported, through narrowing focus, to the edge of the Earth, to a wheatfield, and into a combine. Let's take a closer look at the journey.

The opening phrase, "falling off the earth's edge", catches our immediate attention. The technique of "improbable world"¹ presents the reader with an image that is childlike, almost whimsical. A simple application of logic tells us this can't be. Or can it? This would be a fun inquiry with any of your flat-earth friends, if you have any. Of course, if you are in a location where the horizons are ponderously distant things do seem to fall off the edge of the earth: on the ocean, in the desert, on a prairie. Even a wheatfield.

Spending most of my life in the Garden State of New Jersey, I have been fortunate to be near a wide range of agricultural practices. I have seen fields of varying sizes, bearing a variety of crops. This year, 23,000 acres of wheat were cultivated in New Jersey, some of it right down the road. In the poet's home state of Georgia, more than 200,000 acres were planted. These numbers pale in comparison to the whole country where 47.1 million acres of wheat were planted.² Some of you reading this must be living near a wheatfield.

I prefer my nature raw and wild, but a wheatfield is a thing of beauty. At an early age, I was drawn to the luminosity of fields of sunlit grain. A gentle, unseen breeze becomes visible in a wheatfield, forming ripples that roll across the grain. When not casting a hypnotic spell, the same field could incite pure adventure. Entering the field was like going for a swim, my young, short body holding my head and shoulders "above the surface of the water." Wading deeper, I discovered an abundance of surprises: small villages of woodchucks, living underground in hidden burrows; splashes of wildflowers with vibrant colors, each with their own collection of insects; and waves of sparrows and red-wings who occupied or visited for their own particular pleasures.

Lastly, our poet takes us to the object that is falling off the Earth's edge — a wheatfield combine. A marvel of machinery, a combine harvester is named for the combination of tasks it completes — reaping, threshing, gathering, and winnowing the crop. Invented in 1834 by Hiram Moore, the combine has evolved into a highly efficient machine capable of harvesting over 100 tons per hour. I became mesmerized by these machines in my childhood as they worked the croplands adjacent to our neighborhood. Even now I am compelled to stop and watch the harvest of our local wheat, soy, sorghum, and cornfields.

The machines look like some mechanical beast gobbling up crops. They are fronted by a broad, scoop-like cutter bar that holds the long, spinning reel arms. Here the wheat is cut and pushed onto a feeding conveyor, traveling into the gut of the machine. Inside, unseen, the crop is collected after it is separated from the chaff, which is ejected out the back of the combine. You can sometimes see a plume of grain dust rising in the summer heat.

This haiku is a great application of narrowing focus and scale. Like Marilyn, I see a field of wheat as a place of magic. I am drawn to the combine disappearing beyond the horizon, off the edge of the Earth, trailing its plume of dust. I'll bet that both of us wait with bated breath to see if the combine returns.

Jeff Hoagland
December 2022

¹ See "Haiku Techniques," Jane Reichhold, Frogpond, Autumn, 2000, online at https://www.ahapoetry.com/haiartjr.htm

² National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), Agricultural Statistics Board, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)