"Drowning in Wheat" by John Kinsella

Today's poem, from the Poetry Out Loud website, comes from Australian writer John Kinsella. He was born in 1963. According to the website, his experimental and pastoral poetry often features the Western Australian Landscape.

Key terms for students: pastoral, irony, metaphor, enjambment

Drowning in Wheat   

They’d been warned

on every farm

that playing

in the silos

would lead to death.

You sink in wheat.

Slowly. And the more

you struggle the worse it gets.

‘You’ll see a rat sail past

your face, nimble on its turf,

and then you’ll disappear.’

In there, hard work

has no reward.

So it became a kind of test

to see how far they could sink

without needing a rope

to help them out.

But in the midst of play

rituals miss a beat—like both

leaping in to resolve

an argument

as to who’d go first

and forgetting

to attach the rope.

Up to the waist

and afraid to move.

That even a call for help

would see the wheat

trickle down.

The painful consolidation

of time. The grains

in the hourglass

grotesquely swollen.

And that acrid

chemical smell

of treated wheat

coaxing them into

a near-dead sleep.

This poem is a disturbing meditation on a game-gone-wrong. The line “hard work has no reward” is horrifically ironic, since the setting of the poem is a wheat farm, where hard work is necessary and the reward is your living. This irony is reflected in the title of the poem – “Drowning in Wheat” could refer to a hugely successful farm, but instead it refers literally to the slow death that can happen in the silos. The “play” of the kids is both literal and metaphor throughout- I’m fascinating by the line “In the midst of play / rituals miss a beat” (specifically the word “beat” which, through a musical lens, connects with the “resolve” that occurs in the next line.) The only resolution is what happens when the advice at the beginning of the poem comes full circle, and the kids are victims of their own game – stuck in the silo, slowly becoming “near-dead.”


http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/180362