and everything / Was toil, relentless toil, urged on by need.
—Virgil
It took centuries to domesticate the wild
goat, grow almonds and olives from seed,
harvest barley with stone sickles.
So crops, livestock, and flint tools
could ripple across the Fertile Crescent.
The ox was groaning and bent to the plow.
Cows to own, fences to mend.
Conundrum of walls, things and more
things and the places to put them
so we could settle down and count
on the next meal. Planning, planting,
placating the household gods,
each claiming a share. And vetch,
thistles, weevils to worry the fields.
Drought. Mold. Back-breaking,
that labor, row after tedious row
to sow. From those first seeds,
more food, then more mouths to feed.
And no going back.
Into Future we were
hurtling, spinning and spun.
Wendy Drexler’s third poetry collection, Before There Was Before, was published by Iris Press in 2017. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, J Journal, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Threepenny Review, The Worcester Review, and the Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others; featured on Verse Daily and WBUR’s Cognoscenti; and in numerous anthologies. She’s the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA.
