Over thirty years ago, I was compelled to study Les Murray's poetry. It was an ugly encounter. Let's just say I did not have the ears to hear what he was saying. Even now, after so much time, I find his poems rarely make me feel or think.
On one poem I am willing to shift ground and give a nod of approval, and that is The Broad Bean Sermon. And what happened to bring about this change? Answer: I grew my first crop of broad beans and had the joy of hunting through the "thin bean forest", finding "shirtfulls" of the stuff in all their weird and wonderful shapes.
I think joy is the word. Murray does manage to communicate the sense that a mundane chore, such as picking beans, can put us in touch with something that is greater, perhaps transcendent, and joyous. I suppose it is like an in-joke: only members of the gang get it. Well, Les, I get it now.
The Broad Bean Sermon
Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade
without belief, saying trespass against us in unison,
recruits in mint Air Force dacron, with unbuttoned leaves.
Upright with water like men, square in stem-section
they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways,
kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff.
Above the cat-and-mouse floor of a thin bean forest
snails hang rapt in their food, ants hurry through Escher’s three worlds,
spiders tense and sag like little black flags in cordage.
Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find
plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later
you find shirtfulls more. At every hour of daylight
appear more that you missed: ripe, knobbly ones, fleshy-sided,
thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones,
beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,
beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers
in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice
that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will uncover
till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or
do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality
like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions,
like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string
and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,
the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers …
Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness
—it is your health—you vow to pick them all
even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.
