Fields White for Harvest
© 1997 Ginger Henry Geyer
Glazed porcelain with platinum, acrylic wash
11" x 12 ½" x 10 ½"
Adaptation of Peter Bruegel’s The Harvesters
"...Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest." (John 4:35)
Remember the Little Red Hen? The stingy one who planted the seed, tended it, harvested it, and took it to the mill while her lazy friends refused to help? Then she baked the bread and ate it all herself while they moaned with hunger. Red was a hard worker, no doubt, but she was also selfish. I hope she had indigestion. Many folks see no problem with her noble American “boot strap work ethic.” But her flaw is that she took all the credit for her crop and her bread, as if she alone was responsible for the sun, rain, soil, the fermentation and fire for the oven.
Red also did not bother to find out why her friends would not help. Here on this odd porcelain vessel, Red is perched on the edge of a wheat field with her handy sickle. When the poem begins, she is glaring down at a sleeping man and immediately assumes he is a “sluggard-glutton.” Truth is, he’s in dreamland, resting from a hard morning of work. He’s been lifted out of Bruegel’s painting of the Harvesters that circles the container. But Red confuses him with a similarly postured Bruegel figure, a real glutton spraddled out in a different Bruegel painting, The Land of Cockaigne. That painting is a moralistic allegory about greed and excess, whereas the Harvesters is simply acknowledging a typical day in the life of the working poor.
So the story takes a twist while Red is up there passing judgment on the poor fellow. Jesus walks by. He’s with his disciples, having just thrown a zinger at the Pharisees who equated their picking grain with a violation of the Sabbath work code. Jesus knows what Red Hen is thinking, and he rebukes her snap judgment. She retorts by criticizing the unkempt wheat fields below. Jesus reminds her of the ancient Jewish laws for “compassion corners”:
“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God.”
As Rabbi Stephen Folberg said at a Texas Faith Network conference, “Care of the poor is not a matter of personal whim, it’s law.” Suppose Jesus was referring to that when he pointed out the wheat fields white (ripe) for harvest? If wheat isn’t harvested quickly, it will spoil. What if that passage was an urgent call to compassion, rather than to whip evangelism into a froth? Do your harvesting now, with its requisite donation to the needy, because they depend on it now.
The dialogue between Red and Jesus continues (her lines are in italics). Unlike some of us who rail at those who are stingy and self-sufficient, Jesus “gentles” her. The poem tries to evoke this by color imagery that gently changes from a harsh to cool. White hot yellow melts into gold, then green, blue, lavender and gray. Like a spectrum, compassion gradually dawns upon the Little Red Hen herself as she is welcomed into the ample shelter of the barn.
Fields, harvest, and wheat are inexhaustible and potent images in the Bible. The gleaning command is found also in Ex 22:29, 34:21, and in Lev. 19:9-10. Reaping and sowing are in John 4:36-38, Gal. 6:7, and I Tim 2:6. II Thess. 3:10 is Red Hen’s favorite verse: “If any one will not work, let him not eat”. She probably embroidered it herself, framed it, and hung it in her kitchen.
Images of abundance are alluded to from Proverbs 3:10, "So shall thy barns be filled of plenty". And then there's the neglect of fields in Proverbs 24:30-34. Near the end of the poem, Jesus offers the Red Hen a new identity, taken from 1 Cor. 3:9. It is a favorite line in the Thanksgiving hymn “We Gather Together”:
"You yourselves are God's own field."
Fields White for Harvest
Excuse me I hate to stare--
You, the sluggard-glutton down there:
Crawl outta that white-hot pentagon and
get back to work on that cracked painting!
You rush it, Red.
Land of Plenty is still ahead.
See poem dangling in a tree
who said to pluck it early
eternally waiting
lke Bruegel's fat guy
for it to fall ripe
into his fleshy mouth?
That's The Harvester instead,
full of deserved bread.
Pat 'o Butter answers are stale.
Now is where you are here,
where fields, not honey
are the color of heaven.
Seen one painting, you've seen 'em all,
same with sloths, should be a law.
Doesn't fit, ragged margins
too lazy to cut his corners weak wimp
I've got souls to reap and you're squatting
on my work ethic.
Your bringing in the sheaves
is giving me the heaves.
Bouts of work need pillows of rest
like summer clouds seek blue.
Learn to discern.
Rain is not red.
Ripe is unequal to haste.
Offer your leavings--
compassion corners are Law.
Hey, I ain't Ruth or Henny Penny
that paranoid ninny.
I can do it all myself.
Just give me a nice landscape and
I'll slice a clean horizon line with
this here sickle.
It's just a matter of posturing.
Red speck in distant hue,
Hen peck, it pants for you.
I walk among the lavender
casting tall shadows, staking
shade markers
pointing to where abundance
is stored in blue-grey volumes
where silence drinks
from ample hands
and hunger hurts are fed.