Welcome to Poetically Yours. This segment showcases poetry from northern Illinois poets. This week we feature Tracy Noel.
Noel is a native Chicagoan who returned to her Midwest roots after 20 years. She has traveled extensively, with passionate interests in native cultures and ecology.
In 1988, Noel received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Northland College in Wisconsin. Since that time, she’s tried her hand at many challenges and occupations. They include tree-planting, cleaning up after the EXXON/Valdez oil spill, sustainable agriculture research, for-profit and subsistence farming in numerous regions, landscaping, catering, teaching, tour guiding, fisheries research and public speaking.
While living in Oregon for 14 years, she directed a small non-profit organization and a Youth Garden Project, educating about and advocating for healthy food production, food equality and preservation of natural resources. Meanwhile, she helped to develop a vibrant movement to support healthy and just local food production for local consumption.
In recent years, she has been a farmer and trainer for a non-profit program that helps people rebuild their lives through food production. Presently, she teaches horticulture to incarcerated individuals.
A skilled boater, Noel likes to experience new places “from the water.” She gets most excited about sharing good food, spending time with family, hot summers, cold winters, sunshine, and lightning bugs. And she is most proud when people call her a farmer. This week’s poem is called “Potting Tomatoes.”
Farmers say “potting up”
A step up
A little more space to grow up
So many small soft stems with tiny leaves reaching up
20 different types
Different names
Ever so slightly different invisible genes
Hundreds of plants
More of some types than others
All chosen for great taste, and a few other traits
Count each one to fill the trays - exact
There is no space to waste
30 to a standard bread tray
42 fit in the big ones
15 fill a bulb crate
24 in the blue and white water tubs
Stand empty pots in trays to be filled
Tight and neat, so no soil falls between them
No waste
Pile on the potting soil
Scoop after scoop
Retrieved with a long-handled shovel
Straight from the massive white tote
A 4 foot cube of yum for tomato roots
A thousand pounds of sustenance
Cow s****
Composted to fine fluff
Some vermiculite and sand
Fill them up
Then get the plants
Trays of baby tomato plants seeded in dense rows
Like a miniature field of corn
Plunge fingertips into moist soil, beneath tiny white roots and scoop a cluster of plants
Shake them apart
Gentle hands
Thumb and index finger hold one stem between them
Right hand
Three fingers press open a hole
Left hand
Jiggle roots down deep
Right hand
Push soil around them
Left hand
Just enough to hold them in place
Don’t press
Water will do that job
Next one
And next
One continuous movement
A graceful dance of dirty digits
Performed to the silent songs of plants
In the key of Green
Applauded by tiny waving leaves
It is temporary, this space
A 4 inch cube of fertile substrate to fill with a mass of white roots
A network so vast that, if stretched end to end, the tiny root hairs would reach miles
So dense that when plucked from its plastic shell, every speck of soil is held in place
This work is Artwork
Heart-work
Fast
Efficient
Quiet
Mindful
Life-full
Warm
Necessary
Good work
