Today, I’m combining two things: our 2nd Tuesday of the month image prompt, plus today’s tanka.
Since we posted this at Wonderland, I’ve been wondering and wondering what’s been… bothering me about this image, which this month comes from Flickr user Claus Rebler of Korneuburg, Austria. I’ve finally figured it out: there’s a distinct lack of… life.
We’ve got golden hay – basically dead grass. We’ve got a beautifully rendered sky. We’ve got not one bird, not one insect. The perfection of the image is eerily sterile and a bit worrying, when taken from that perspective. And yes – I have watched one too many farming horror movies, I guess. (Actually I don’t care for horror movies at all, having been forced by Mean Boys to watch a part of Children of the Corn when I was five. [Parents: when visiting the homes of friends with children of their own, be sure your child knows that it’s perfectly acceptable to walk away from said children and come and sit by you if said children are absolute wastes of carbon.] Ugh.)
I have a teensy postage stamp of a back garden, and I have dropping by the resident phoebe, goldfinches, starlings, doves, the odd kestrel, uncounted wrens, robins, and massive, shining black crows. How does this whole field not have one crow? (I’d like to give this field my crow, because my crow will not leave the shiny bits of glass in my tiny fountain alone. Each morning I wake to them scattered on the ground. Each morning, I put them back. The crow has likely decided that this is a game…)
What is a farm without bugs and birds? What is growth without …life? How is a story without antagonists?
riddle of the prairie
under sterile skies
Rapunzel’s straw, in bobbins
already spun gold
a sanitized fairytale
happily ever after