Poet’s Corner: Ode to a Stump Farm 1

12 September 2026

(15 January 2016) Last week we looked at pieces from John Keats’ long and unfinished poems, “Hyperion,” and “The Fall of Hyperion,” noting that I first read these long fragments at the time I was beginning to work on my Senior poetry project, becoming the spark that led to the title poem, “Ode to a Stump Farm.” I had written several narrative poems on incidents that happened while we were living on this ‘stump farm’ (we’ll explain this in a later post, as it is part of this poem). Both the professor and grad assistant indicated in the strongest terms that this kind of poem, the narrative, was my poetic voice, and they wanted to see more like these. I continued to troll back through my mind for other, equally comical situations that lent themselves to poetry. This action, along with Keats’ imagery, gave me the idea for the title poem; here are the first two sections:

Ode to a Stump Farm

I.
I wander hallways of
memory
passing doors hiding chambers
wherein the past is held
awaiting recall
Door marked “Stump Farm”
opens.
I enter, see scattered
shards of glass
broken
from the mirror of reality,
each piece reflecting
the past.
I handle each, fondly reliving
a place now lost.

II.
How does one say
goodbye
to an old friend
if that friend
is a place?

Memories are tricky things: they come to us in pieces, or fragments, and our minds wrestle to make sense out of them. As we recall the past, certain things come to us more strongly, and clearly, usually those incidents that had a profound impact on us. These shards all came from the time when I, as a teenager, struggled to understand who I was, and where I fit in, so many of the poems from this collection are filled with teenage angst. Much of this period in all our lives is laced with this struggle, and only much later do we really understand what happened, and how it all worked together to make us who we are. Beyond the image of the broken mirror of reality, I pose the question in section 2, of how one says goodbye to a place, and so much of this poem is an effort to do just that, and the reason I called it an ode. More of this poem next week, until then, get your own copy of this collection from ebook retailers. Good reading!