Vox Populi
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Mark Danowsky: The Rocky Mountain Locust Surge
One story is about the farmer
who just started running
right into the black mass
in an attempt at dispersal.
How far past wits’ end
would you have to be pushed?
He must have become the bull
seeing red. No. Just a human
out of ideas, out of hope—
ready for oblivion.
I’d guess the cloud of locusts
looked like a giant TV
tuned to static.
When he found himself
back on the outside,
they say the locusts had eaten
the clothes right off his body.
Can you see him standing there
in the middle of a dry field
flattened by plague,
naked, except for his boots,
his family looking on
from the windows of their dusty home
wondering why they came here
where promises are unfulfilled?
~~~~
—
This poem first appeared in Gargoyle Magazine #65, and Marjorie Maddox selected it for The Poetry Moment.
Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry and Poetry Craft Essays Editor for Cleaver Magazine. He is the author of several short poetry books. His latest poetry collection is Take Care (Moon Tide Press, 2025). He writes and curates Stay Curious on Substack.
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“can you see him standing there…”
I can see him standing, I can see me and us standing in the middle of our lives also wondering why and how we came here. This poem is vivid.
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Yes!
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Wonderfully focused poem that takes us deep inside.
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Superb, unforgettable poem.
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The farmers in many countries have become food factories. Everything on a large scale. And they’ve been sold the story of avarice, of productivity, of making big money. And now they’re in heap great big trouble. No soybeans to China and fun stuff like that. Their soil eroding or simply getting poorer for lack of care, care sacrificed for example to what used to be Monsanto and the big buck. Even during WWII, it was the farmers that kept us all alive. Smallish farms, good crops, they were the ones who always had enough to eat and could pull the rest of us through too – against a price, of course. But still…
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I agree, Rose Mary. Factory farming, mono-species fields, heavy reliance on poisons… corporate agriculture is destroying the land and the entire rural culture that fostered it.
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My father-in-law who grew up there, might have called it a blizzard of bugs, or a summer ice storm.
Donowsky’s poem reminds me of the writing of Wallace Stegner or the incomparable Willa Cather in her books like Oh, Pioneers or My Antonia. Stegner’s book Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs tells true tales of this desolate drought-prone land. It’s our 21st century country, where the Big Rock Candy Mountain of immigrant dreams is now turning into a locust infestation of despair. Hope? Instead dreamers encounter a biblical plague, a blizzard of bugs that can fly right through their screens, and denude hope. But maybe, just maybe, the family in the poem can still lift its shoulders.
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Thank you for this beautiful post, Jim, full of allusions and connections.
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What a good comment!
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Me too, and yes — this one seems like a scene from The Birds – only written by Salvador Dali.
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The image of the farmer standing in the field naked except for his boots stays with me.
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I admire Mark Donowsky’s work as the editor of ONE ART poetry journal. His poetry has an interesting edge to it as well…
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Mark is a gift to the literary community–like someone else whose initials are MS.
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