Ben Corvo
The Allotment
My grandfather was a gardener, and my mother like him.
but my grandfather made his garden an every-summer thing,
and my mother? When the spirit moved her, and sometimes
it only moved her part way. Do seed packets count? Inspiration?
Neither do I know how to credit my own accumulated hours
of non-accomplishment. Still, the hard-baked, sandy ground
once grew a few tattered rows, duly weeded and watered
for a season or two. Now it is a scar of peeled-back lawn
at the meeting-place of two cinder-block walls, in the winter
a mud-puddle, in the summer a dust-pit, which the children
dig and push into an entire topography of cities
with highways running between them, a civilization
in the making, where no one struggles to make a living,
and the soil is turned, without horror, without pity.
“‘The Allotment’ feels like an outlier where Collateral is concerned. Although the poem draws on the experience of ‘violent conflict beyond the combat zone,’ this experience is far from explicit. Like ‘White Cranes’, my previous poem in Collateral, ‘The Allotment’ addresses self-protective, generally unacknowledged postures, both personal and communal, both immediate and generational, that invidiously make the experience and violent infliction of injury seem necessary, inevitable, desirable—or wholly invisible. Eschewing declamation and accusation, which (however warranted) only seem to make these postures even more rigid, ‘The Allotment’ proceeds by indirection, above all with humor and gentleness. We soften others by softening ourselves. I cannot suggest that this is the best or only strategy, or even that this is an adequate strategy here, but by the closing lines it does seem to bring the horror home.” —Ben Corvo
Ben Corvo has lived much of his life at the fringes of war—as a child in the US, hearing family stories about his grandfather’s military service and his mother’s experience growing up in army posts; his adolescence during civil war in Colombia; as an adult teaching in the US, watching students ship off to Iraq and Afghanistan; and over the last years amid the ethnic and sectarian divides in and around Jerusalem/Al-Quds. His work has appeared previously in Salmagundi, Magma, The Tel Aviv Review of Books, and other publications.