I have always wanted to write a mower poem, in the tradition (or at least the spirit) of Andrew Marvell’s marvelous mower series and Philip Larkin’s touching hedgehog poem. The theme is also alluded to in the first season of the HBO TV series True Detective.

Larkin’s The Mower was one of his last and is an almost perfectly crafted little suburban meditation on mortality, although Larkin, being Larkin, always likes to leave a little roughness around the edges, which only adds to the appeal. The poem has rightly recently become a stock-in-trade of social media condolence notices.

Marvell’s series of four (five, if you count The Garden) mower poems, to which Larkin alludes, covers a much broader range of issues. Marvell’s (human rather than mechanical) mower is obviously and explicitly used, as Larkin’s is, to represent death—the scythe-bearing grim reaper—but the motif is also employed to address the human predilection for destroying wild nature in an effort to create the kind of stagnant but apparently more attractive-looking simulacrum of nature that is found in gardens. This, in turn, is linked to the cruel manner in which people often treat one other when romantically attached.

A man atop a motorized lawnmower is an ominous presence throughout the first season of True Detective. And this mower theme ties in with Detective Rust Cohle’s long lugubrious rants regarding the noisy, foul-smelling, murderous ‘psychosphere’ in which humankind has swaddled and shrouded itself and the natural world, against the backdrop of an eerily beautiful Louisiana landscape scarred by industry and a community rotted by perverse interpersonal relationships. Never has a twitching neurotic ex-hippy on the verge of being ready to vote for someone like Trump better been portrayed on screen. The name of the character alone speaks volumes and Matthew McConaughey plays the part with a rare combination of acute thespian sensitivity and barely-bridled savage artistic license.

My own modest contribution to this long and noble tradition came to me almost out of nowhere, in its entirety, in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, in the early hours of the morning, at a time when I should have been sleeping. I have dashed it down as best I can.

I should add that my mower poem emerged as a free-standing section of an emotionally and technically difficult-to-write longer poem I am currently struggling to work on, on the subject of a real-life spree shooting.

The Mower

A man mowing a lawn thinks no ill

will befall his world, as he whistles

and the blades whir into a blur

of shredded grass and the smell

of cut grass mingles with the slight scent

of roses lining the fence, the cool breeze

of the summer air. The buzz

of a small plane passing overhead

leaves a fading signature on the sky;

the clip-clopping clapping sounds

of tennis on TV coming from indoors.

*

The shot rings out with a single

sharp metallic whistle. Birds

scatter out of the pear tree.

Blood decorates the nasturtiums.

The lawnmower whirs on growlingly,

tipped over,

stuck in place, digging into the turf

with hungry angry teeth,

as if the thing had a life of its own.