.

In a Home

based on Michael Bunker’s grandmother (b. 1909)
as described in his book Surviving Off Off-Grid

.

I

Old, blind, and helpless, Grandma’s all alone—
Bed, radio, phone, and nothing stimulating,
__Indifferent care-crew members—
Unwanted, worn-out human unit, waiting
To be no more than carvings on a stone,
__Like all that she remembers.

Her rural girlhood mostly was the same
As that of Cain and Abel’s unsung sister
__And girls throughout the ages:
A large, extended family to assist her
In growing food and cooking over flame—
__The meals were thus their wages.

Her farm work done, she played out in the hills
With family dogs and lambs and half-grown neighbors,
__Her sisters and her brothers,
And in her teenage years, thanks to her labors,
She married young with now-forgotten skills
__To be six children’s mother.

Her parents both had been allowed to die
At home, fed wood-cooked meals, with kin surrounded,
__And prayers read by their pastor.
My mother calls her poor, but wealth abounded,
All traded for a snake-oil salesman’s lie
__That soon became her master.

.

II

The media said to buy consumer goods,
Electric labor-savers from the city,
__And be assimilated,
Or Grandma’d be an object of their pity:
A third-world widow living in the woods,
__Still undomesticated.

She had to pay the corporations back
As an electric-power-and-plumbing renter;
__She sold her home for schooling
To be a nurse in some big birthing center,
Where now she’s just a name upon a plaque
__Right near where vents do cooling.

Her children couldn’t care for her old age
Once on the hamster-wheel of debt and earnings,
__And so they pay some strangers
To keep her, full of home- and family-yearnings,
Locked up just like a sparrow in a cage,
__Away from age’s dangers.

When family-hunger hounds her like a ghost,
She calls her past in area codes scattered
__Across this once-free nation.
She calls old comfort from when family mattered
To chatter, be in better times engrossed—
__Times smashed by modernization.

You may recall, she’s blind, can’t see the phone,
And so she speed-dials one of us at random
__And prays that one will answer.
Convenience and consumer greed in tandem
Ensure that once we’re old, we’re all alone—
__Modernity’s a cancer.

.

.

Driving Through Kansas

I drive a Kansas highway, full of scorn;
The squares of endless flatness wear me down—
Oh look!  It’s yet another field of corn!

The semi truck behind me blasts its horn,
Allowing me to hear the driver’s frown—
I drive a Kansas highway, full of scorn.

Brochures for Highway 83 don’t warn
About vast fields of dried-out gray and brown—
Oh look!  It’s yet another field of corn!

The filling station food mart’s stocked with porn
(The playhouse of that agribusiness town)—
I drive a Kansas highway, full of scorn.

The highway’s shown the same old scene since morn;
I pass gray grass torn like a tattered gown—
Oh look!  It’s yet another field of corn!

The amber waves of grain the state has borne
Are harvested by every Big-Ag clown.
I drive a Kansas highway, full of scorn—
Oh look!  It’s yet another field of corn!

.

.

Joshua C. Frank works in the field of statistics and lives in the American Heartland.  His poetry has been published in Snakeskin, The Lyric, Sparks of Calliope, Westward Quarterly, Atop the Cliffs, Our Day’s Encounter, The Creativity Webzine, Verse Virtual, and The Asahi Haikuist Network, and his short fiction has been published in Nanoism and The Creativity Webzine.

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28 Responses

  1. Paul A. Freeman

    It’s indeed upsetting to see older people left behind due to the ever-changing face of technology and changes in family dynamics.

    I love the Villanelle. You’ve created a great feeling of navigating an inexorable nothingness. I was reminded of stretches from the Stephen King novel, ‘The Stand’, though that was Nebraska.

    Thanks for the reads, Joshua.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Paul.

      Bunker’s thesis is that the troubles I describe in “In a Home” are inherently part of industrialization and modernization, and I agree with him. As for “Driving Through Kansas,” that’s based on one time when I drove through there while still living in Texas. They tell you U.S. Highway 83 is a beautiful drive, and it is in Texas, but once you get to Kansas, it makes you want to turn back.

      Reply
  2. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Both of these poems are stamped and stocked with great visuals that enhance the experience. I have thought back to the past years of growing old that lacked modern amenities but had localized family support for warmth and attention. Before the radio, there were no external stimuli to assuage and entertain the mind. Basically, they were confined to their mind and the rocking chair. I have traveled upper midwestern states and gazed upon those endless fields of corn, just I have traveled on a train through Siberia and grew tired of seeing only endless tracts of trees. Your repetitive use of “Oh look! It’s yet another field of corn!” adds the perfect feeling of boredom.
    Great job on both.

    Reply
  3. jd

    Both are such true pictures. I especially liked
    the phrase “Allowing me to hear the driver’s frown” in “Driving Through Kansas”.

    Reply
  4. Joseph S. Salemi

    These are two really good poems — and both of them illustrate (in painful ways) the truth of the last line of “In a Home”: Modernity’s a cancer.

    The first poem was deeply upsetting to me, because I have known far too many instances of older persons being left to die in the loveless circumstances of the sanitized world of “the caring professions.” Talk about a mis-named profession!

    The second poem is more generalized — it touches upon the ways in which an originally agricultural America has been debased into “endless flatness” by Big Ag, Big Money, and floods of pornography to dull the minds of the populace.

    These poems are indictments of crimes that can never be brought to justice.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Joe. I’m honored.

      I felt the same way about the source material of “In a Home” as you did reading the poem, which tells me I conveyed it well. I was compelled to write it after talking with my aunt, who lives alone at home (my uncle died from the COVID shot a year ago), and whose grown children are too absorbed in their own lives to take care of her. Like Bunker’s grandmother, she calls us from time to time just to have someone—anyone—from family to talk with, just as I describe in lines 46-48.

      It’s true, what I observed in Kansas is happening everywhere to some extent. Cost-effective and easily marketable food, if you can call it food, has weakened us to the degree that a young man born in 2000 has less testosterone than a man over 65 did in 2000 (my father was in the latter category). Unbridled capitalism has allowed big corporations to ruin the world and control people with pornography and other things that overstimulate the senses (e.g., electronic screens), effectively becoming a more insidious form of Communism.

      That’s why I have to write these. The powers that be have hidden these things from the people.

      Reply
  5. Brian A. Yapko

    Both of these poems are wonderful, Josh. Of the two I am quite partial to “In a Home” which tells an almost cinematic story of an elderly lady whose life progresses (if you can call it that) from a deeply traditional rural upbringing through the tyranny of technology and into an old age debilitated equally by blindness and loneliness. You tell this tale with great skill. I especially like your reference to her as Cain and Abel’s unsung sister because this dramatically expands the scope of the work. This is not just one sad lady that we’re reading about — it’s humanity. And, by the time we get to the end, it is very hard not to share the almost-luddite view that “modernity is a cancer.”

    Your villanelle is hilarious even if it veers into sarcasm. (Oh yay, more cornfields!) But in this context sarcasm is harmless and no corn was harmed during the making of this poem. But seriously, I’m not sure when I’ve ever seen the repetends of a villanelle used to greater effect. It works really well. I’ve never been to Kansas, but I have driven the length of Oklahoma from west to east as well as big swaths of New Mexico and west Texas. I understand fully the neverending monotony of what you so amusingly describe.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Brian! I’m especially honored given that you won first place in the contest!

      As usual, you’ve found the point of the poem. Nearly all of us are far more isolated than we were even ten years ago, let alone a hundred, and it’s all thanks to the technology and industrialization that the modern world vaunts so much.

      I laughed out loud at “no corn was harmed,” etc. I’m especially honored by your compliment on the use of the repetends of the villanelle. I’m indebted to Monika Cooper for this method, in her poem “Crimes Against My Sanity,” in which the repetends are, “At any-given-time o’clock,” and, “Oh look—is that another sock?” This kind of thing is why teachers of writing recommend reading to see how it’s done.

      Reply
      • Joshua C. Frank

        Correction: it was by Anna Arredondo. I need to stop doing this from memory.

  6. Cynthia Erlandson

    I agree with all these comments, Josh. These are excellent poems — the first is very moving; and the second manages to be funny and sad at the same time.

    Reply
  7. Adam Sedia

    For now I’m commenting only on “Driving through Kansas.” I love me a good villanelle, and yours is very good indeed. It has a touch of the postmodern, using a classical form of love poetry to describe what is cold, sterile, loveless, and (secretly) industrialized: the seemingly fertile heartland nothing but a multimillion-dollar capital asset, a land where pornography becomes pastime. You really capture the spirit of the place.

    Reply
  8. Michael Vanyukov

    I am here about those fields of corn. I understand it’s tiresome to look at them, and that is very well conveyed. I also understand Roy’s comment well, about endless steppes. Nonetheless, to a great degree, in my perspective of a refugee from Russia (its damned empire), I see those corn fields as symbols of American freedom rather than slavery, which is what Russian steppes symbolize.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Michael. That’s an interesting perspective, and the fact that our patriotic songs share the same symbolism (hence the line about “amber waves of grain”) was why I had to write this. These symbols of freedom have been turned into a hidden but nonetheless real form of slavery. Just the fact that the government gives itself the legal right to take a large part of our wages in taxes, and even take our children away for any reason it chooses, shows that we are its slaves. In fact, as I allude to in “In a Home,” all inhabitants of industrialized countries are slaves to one degree or another.

      As an American, I see my country losing its once-cherished freedoms more and more and slowly but surely turning into its own version of the former Soviet Union. I myself immigrated from the more oppressive liberal areas to the more conservative “Flyover Country,” but I’m under no illusions that this area will not one day turn into another California, or worse, Canada.

      The culture of death will not cease its invasion of every country until everyone they can find is converted to it or killed. If you think otherwise, you’re in for a nasty surprise.

      Reply
  9. Shaun C. Duncan

    In my opinion, “In A Home” is one of the finest poems you’ve written, a heart-breaking work which acts as a searing condemnation of modernity and the deeply corrosive effects of consumerism and usuary. The closing line might have come off as heavy-handed if the lead-up hadn’t been handled with such skill and delicacy, but instead it hits hard – as it should.

    “Driving Through Kansas” is a fine villanelle and the form works well to convey a sense of boredom in repetition without becoming boring itself.

    Reply
  10. Margaret Coats

    Joshua, first let me offer condolences on the loss of your uncle to an unnecessary medical intervention, leaving your aunt alone and lonely.

    Next, congratulations on “In A Home” as your most serious and complex poem. The poetic structure is admirable, and your language carries a flow of thought throughout a long work. Its fault, in my opinion, is to combine the real plight of the elderly with blame on abstract modernity and media–and even on the foolish elderly themselves. You do have something to say here, and I highly support Catholic agrarian thinking, despite its ideals having proved impractical almost everywhere during the last century. Educated discernment is needed in applying them. That’s worth saying another way. Discerning education is needed in applying agrarian ideals.
    The blame in individual cases of abandonment lies less on modernity than with the family. I know dozens of families, including those of persons on this thread, who have shouldered their duties to family members, with outcomes that may not be ideal considering the fallen world we live in, but are far, far happier than that of Grandma Bunker. Who dares to claim “I cannot care”? That is egoism without Christian civilization. When it avoids practical present action in favor of Eden off-grid for the egoist, it accomplishes no good.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Margaret, for your condolences, your compliments, and your thoughts on the subject of the poem. Allow me to address your concerns.

      1. The speaker is an unnamed grandson of Bunker’s grandmother (it could be Bunker, but not necessarily), and these are his thoughts, based on the source material. As for myself, my mother lives with me, and I take care of her. I suppose it’s a compliment to my ability to write in another’s voice that people regularly confuse my speakers’ thoughts with my own. Bunker himself said he loved the poem.

      2. It is true that we all have the free will to make sacrifices and swim against the cultural tide to take care of family or not. Again, I do this, but not everyone wants to make the effort. Bunker is a Christian, as is the speaker, so both agree on this point. The family that shut her away in a “home” (what a misnomer!) is the same family that took care of her parents, just one generation removed. The modern world is a Pleasure Island that entices people in and then turns them into caged donkeys in the end, which is why the donkey is a perfect symbol for the Democratic Party. Society’s currents are a very real force that pushes people to behave in certain ways, and few have the moral strength to resist. The intent of this poem is not to discourage practical action, but to shine a harsh light on the modern world, expose it for what it is, and, as the author aims to do, help readers decolonize their minds from modern beliefs.

      3. As Bunker says elsewhere in his book, what he proposes is not living without technology so much as examining each technology and asking whether it’s beneficial to have it in one’s life, just as we already do with technologies such as nuclear power.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Joshua, I agree with both you and Bunker about the proper approach to technology. Every technological invention should be examined and this question alone should be asked: Does it help human beings to live a decent human life, or does it make life unnecessarily more difficult?

        Unfortunately the general attitude today is to worship technology simply for its own sake, and to idolize it as something that cannot in any circumstances be questioned or criticized. Why does everything have to be done “on-line”? Why are devices constantly being complicated beyond reason, so that one needs an instructional manual to use the latest model? Why are mailboxes filled with notices that something ordinarily simple now has to be done in a more intricate, detailed, and byzantine way?

        Back in 1948, Friedrich Junger wrote an excellent little book called “The Failure of Technology.” It was absolutely prescient about the ways in which a rampant idolization of technology was taking over the modern world, and that it had nothing whatsoever to do with helping anyone or making life easier or being time-saving or labor-saving. It was purely a new kind of religion.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        Yes, like Bunker’s grandmother, we’ve all bought into the hype of saving time and labor because we’re lazy—the vice that corrupted Sodom, according to Ezekiel. Now technology is too powerful, and it controls not only what we can and can’t do, but what we think as well.

        Of course, scoffers point out that I’m saying this on a computer and therefore have no credibility… but it’s precisely the technology-addicted who need to hear the message that technology is a problem.

  11. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Josh, these are two beautifully written, very different poems that paint linguistic pictures of the spirit-crushing aspects of today’s world.

    ‘In a Home’ is heartbreaking and gets to the very core of all that is wrong with modern society in its treatment of the elderly. I’ve heard it said that “How a society treats its most vulnerable is always the measure of its humanity” and your words put society to shame. It is a hard-hitting poem that get its poignant point across powerfully. The line, “Locked up just like a sparrow in a cage /Away from age’s dangers” will stay with me long after leaving this page… the measure of a very fine poem indeed.

    “Driving Through Kansas” puts me in mind of the journeys I’ve experienced in Texas… miles and miles of flat land with no change to the scenery and no turns in the road… the vultures circling… my mind numbing, and my eyes and heart growing heavy. Josh, you have used the villanelle form to excellent effect with the repeating lines driving (pun intended) the point home perfectly. Very well done indeed! Thank you!

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      Thank you, Susan. I clearly did what I aimed to do with these poems; as you know, I see myself as an American version of the protest poets in Muslim and Communist countries we hear about. I’m happy to hear that those lines will stay with you for a long time.

      It’s very true that “How a society treats its most vulnerable is always the measure of its humanity.” Already, many states and countries have legalized assisted suicide and encouraged the option so much that they scarcely know what to do with someone who refuses it. This is related to the fact that the culture pushes abortion at the drop of a hat. As Dennis Prager said so well, “If you say ‘men give birth,’ we all know your position on Hamas. When people have a distorted moral value system, that distortion applies to just about every issue.”

      I’ve never been to the truly flat parts of Texas (I-10 was as far south as I could take)… when I drove on U.S. 83, it was a nice drive in Texas and even the Oklahoma panhandle… but once you cross the Kansas state line, it turns into what I describe almost instantly. It’s as monotonous as driving at night!

      Reply
      • Mike Bryant

        Josh… I agree with everyone here about these wonderful, thought-provoking poems. I’m really interested in your Prager quote above. I agree with Prager but believe that it goes further. I think that if someone says that a man can give birth, then you know his position on everything. Yes, they have distorted morals but, more than that, they have given up their entire mind to the “current thing.” In video game speak they have become NPCs… the non-playable characters from the old roleplaying games, RPGs. They only do what they are supposed to do. They only believe what they are programmed to believe.
        It is interesting that if you move each of the letters “NPC” one place back in the alphabet, you end up with “MOB,” another fitting descriptive for these perpetually offended obtuse progressives, or POOPs.
        Isn’t it different and wonderful to be in a place where everyone can believe as they like and express those beliefs?
        SCP is all about true diversity.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        I completely agree. I’ve observed that to embrace any part of the insanity is to embrace it all.

  12. Joshua C. Frank

    I thought you’d all be interested to know that Michael Bunker himself enjoyed “In a Home,” saying, “Thanks for this. I like it very much, and I’m honored. … Good work.”

    Reply

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