The Broad Bean Sermon by Les Murray

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.