Friday poetry challenge: modern farming

When a colleague asked what I've been doing since classes got out, I said, "I've been spending a lot of time with the hoe."

He looked puzzled.

"H-O-E," I said. "The garden implement used for ripping weeds from the ground."

He'd heard "ho," which doesn't really fit my lifestyle. Good thing I didn't try to tell him about the time I saw my neighbor in the garden with a hoe in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Modern farming!

I wish all my Farmville-obsessed friends would spend a few minutes in my garden wielding a real hoe. Farmville farmers are far removed from Edwin Markham's "Man with the Hoe," an empty brute "bowed by the weight of centuries" and so enslaved to toil that he has become "A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, / Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox."

Farmville farmers don't struggle and sweat and suffer from blisters and bug bites, but on the other hand, I challenge them to subsist on the vegetables they produce. Given the choice between a bushel of virtual tomatoes and one red ripe tomato fresh from my garden, which would you rather byte?


The Gal with the Hoe

Oh there once was a gal with a hoe
(with an "e" at the end, don't you know)
who longed for a bite
(with an "i") of delight,
so she urged some tomatoes to grow.

While she sweated and toiled without harm, full
of dreams of produce by the armful,
her friends plowed their fields
and increased their yields
in that popular Facebook app, Farmville.

Which tomatoes will draw more attention:
the virtual kind (an invention
of mouse clicks and bytes)
or the juicy delights
that grow with the hoe's intervention?

Now it's your turn: it's gardening season, so make some rhymes grow!