Some Holga photos from the rolls I developed from this post. These photos are of a barn in Greencastle, Indiana— where I went to college. As someone who grew up in a farming community with sheep and baby kittens, this poem really gets to me. I love how the plain language and simplicity of the poem mirror the outward appearances of the area’s landscape and people. But the more you reread the poem, the more you get to know people in these Indiana towns, and the more you explore these farmlands, you realize there’s a beauty in simplicity and an admirable intricacy in things that at first appear plain.

“What Grows Here”

By Joe Heithaus

Beyond Big Walnut & the clusters
of sycamore and cottonwood, fields of corn & beans coming up
after the long furrows of winter, sheep lambing
in the frost beside the riprap of early spring, lightning
thudding up the dry summer dust, Mr. Alcorn nudging
the wheel of his combine while the bees’ wings

of corn chaff swirl around him like snow,
ironweed, pokeweed, bindweed & the children
who grow so fast, some in the country, some in town,
all caught between our stories of how we got here & stayed?