☀ Today's Poem: "FARMING. AND THE LABOR OF MAN" Ryan Skrabalak

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March 9, 2025

FARMING. AND THE LABOR OF MAN

Ryan Skrabalak

Altars, prehensile tonsils of an idea’s cessation
and the singing fathers who sigh duress up-camp

aught they be flavor’s serious mutant sightly error
under a Prius in silicone milk, crusted over?

Gold beans shake their fragile gay and silver tears.
Slender vetch, calamity in silver dreaming, all

the country’s lines segue from urine avenues.
Don’t be afraid to perfume the earth with labor

that’s the genius of the deadhead grass. To put a cloud
in a hectare of smoke. It mutates a fetal requiem

of crackle next to the interest gained in sorrow.
Say the name is sterile—torch it—no profits here

attack a leavened stipend of creeping. Flamed arrears
live inside the occult virus of the veined soil

like a pastoral counterpoint: a sieve’s per annum
excoriates a humor of exits so plural

from the book LEVITATING SCUM / Tree Jumps Rainbow

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This April, Poetry Daily would like to turn the spotlight on YOU, the loving READER of poetry. What is it that makes you give yourself over to a poem? Which poem in Poetry Daily made you think, surprised you, moved you, or changed your world just a little?

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Choose any poem from our archive of more than two thousand poems since 2018 and tell us about it in 100 words or so. We’re not expecting a “professional” answer but one from your heart, nothing is too trivial—for a chance to be featured in our groundbreaking What Sparks Poetry series and win a free book!

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(subject: National Poetry Month)
by March 24, 2025

"Layli Long Soldier On Translating Poetry into Sculpture"

"I’m fascinated by how these kinds of intentional constraints push me into a space of immense possibility and allow me to work with very heavy subject matter—let’s say colonization, or boarding schools—that require so much emotional energy. Having a device distracts from the emotional content so that I’m working with another part of my brain. Figuring out how to work with a material or process lifts some of the emotional energy that I might otherwise be hindered by."

viaARTFORUM

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Color cover image of Evie ShocKley's book, Suddenly We

What Sparks Poetry:
Evie Shockley on Language as Form

"I found this truism (which seems to readily reproduce itself: 'one sin begets another,' 'one tragedy begets another,' 'one wedding begets another') bubbling up in my brain. If only one vote begat another in that inevitable way, I sighed, thinking of how hard it was to get women’s right to vote established as the law of the land—and of how long it was after that before Black women were able to exercise their 'women’s rights.'"

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