The Iron Harvest
BY ELIZA GILBERT
Yearly, farmers in eastern France turn up several hundred tons
of unexploded munitions from the First World War. Officials expect
complete clearance of artillery to take up to nine hundred years.
Soft below the killing fields of Verdun, tumors
smile in sleep, forgotten again
by the iron harvest. Peer into the gun
-shy hush of the meadowed-over trenches, see how they’ve grown
bluestem and aster in the swerve of snakeskin. Quick, before green
is felled again by the perennial war
against moldboard, see hummingbirds nurse the beebalm
rising plumb to mortar scars while in the next field,
metastases cough out their guts
worth of mustard gas, unclothing the crabgrass
and the history books, the shatter
spilled with its voicebox intact. Let me remind you,
it wheezes to the ruptured
sheep, how easy it is for cells
to come undone. How unexploded
is just another word for wait. The earth again
upturned in tills of molt and mangle, the shells
bubbling aground as fickle as newborns and cradled as such
when carted to the disposal depot. Farmers
flay another scab, shove their fingers
through another gape. Like any good medic,
they resect the bloodwet lead, and like any good bomb,
it has friends. Hear it dog-whistle to the aneurysms
afester under the next generation
of poppies. The next.
Hear it live beneath us still.
