The Tyrant’s Harvest (Pre-2000

The Tyrant’s Harvest (Pre-2000 – )
Rows march in formation, each corn stalk
and soybean drilled by the patent’s silent whip,
No wild sunflowers in the margins, no memory of weeds,
just a barcode tattooed on every kernel’s lip,
Farms that once bore a thousand varieties now bear the stench of sameness,
a corporate design,
The old man on his porch spits out a name for every lost melon, every gone tomato,
counting extinction by the vine,
Seed vaults in Norway hoard what the Midwest plows
have erased—DNA locked away from profit’s hand,
And the wind that used to carry secrets now carries
only pollen built to obey the company brand.

Chorus
They engineered plenty, but gave us hunger
that multiplies in the mirror of sameness,
The old seeds die out in the darkness,
and famine waits in the shadow of progress,
What we lost was flavor, freedom, the chance to weather a blight,
Now the whole world’s table depends on a patent—on the whim of a company,
on the law’s silent bite.

The field hand kneels in June, palm full of sterile promise,
the seed can’t remember its father’s song,
Monoculture stretches horizon to horizon, roots starved of history,
each row an echo of the same dull throng,
Cicadas thrum for the vanished—the Cherokee White Eagle corn, the blue squash,
the lentil that fed whole towns,
But now you plant what the lawyers allow, and next spring you pay for the privilege,
watching old varieties drown,
Blight creeps like rumor through the uniform stalks—one sickness
and a continent chokes on hunger,
No wild grain, no secret potato in the fence row,
just patents and chemical hunger making the harvests younger.

The farmer’s ledger is an obituary,
debts and seed receipts written in red by a stranger’s pen,
He holds a handful of black earth,
dreams of his father’s patchwork garden before the monocrop men,
Every kernel he plants is licensed, every bean a contract’s child,
The lawyers claim even the wild dandelion, send bills for the rain,
make trespassers of the wind running wild,
A single gene drift, a stray bee with a mouthful
of pollen—now the whole valley’s liable,
And the last independent seed is stored in a coffee can,
its worth now purely archival.

Rivers run with chemicals, roots rot in a sterile land,
The orchard dies from the inside,
all the apples identical—none with scars or a story, just clones on demand,
Children eat bread that’s bred to last on a shelf, not in a body,
And when the blight finally comes, famine rides the monoculture like a highway,
indifferent, gaudy,
A thousand fields fall together, dominoes set up by a single, greedy hand,
And somewhere in the wind, the lost seeds rattle against glass,
whispering of a richer, wilder, lawless land.

The woman in the village market stares at the baskets—green, perfect, tasteless,
No wild strawberry, no rogue bean to barter for, just a price and a patent,
every harvest faceless,
A meal built of sameness, a future built of risk,
all eggs in one engineered nest,
While the hungry pray for rain, or for a crack in the system,
for a single outlaw seed to pass the test,
They remember the color of corn that used to glow in twilight,
Now every kernel is a copy, every field a threat,
and famine is waiting just out of sight.

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