Scarecrow

[-J-]

(Tune in my head: Gene Severens - Scarecrow, Michael Severens arrangement)

With its arms outstretched towering

Imbued with a specter --

I see crows cowering

before this stone-faced protector.

Whose crops are these within the field below?

Do they belong to the farmer

who I will never know?

Mercurial and unforgiving

was the carpenter who built that scarecrow

clad in graven armor.

He never truly knew his subject

or the people he fed with this field's crops

sharecroppers mocking his object.

No -- it belongs to the aphid

whose feeding never truly stops

while untended crops go rancid.

You ask me to contort

in praise of an in absentia sculptor --

But what happens when I cannot support

this twisted crumbling Cristo Redentor?