Member Poem

After reading the novel titled
Broken English by Paul L Gaus...

accentuating, exhibiting, incorporating...
the Amish, whose long history of farming
with horses and mules, dates back
to when horse-drawn plows
first used to break up the earth.

While some newer Amish farms
use tractor-drawn equipment,
many Amish farmers still prefer
to use horse-drawn implements.

Said sturdy and simple contrivance
sports prominent envious society
regarding yours truly,
who feels tethered to capitalist construct
gagging me with unremitting yoke.

Hence, I experienced being woke
at mine incompatibility
inured my entire life
to the abstract codas, credo, dogma,
ethos, karma, mores, precepts...
constituting western civilization.

How quaint to bare witness, where townsfolk
congregate to resolve community conflicts
suspicious should an hyperconscious,
and pugnacious "English" poke
their figurative noses
where they don't belong kinsfolk
of sect who sell dried tobacco
foodstuffs, crafts evoke
hankering (regarding yours truly,
a run of the mill doubting Thomas)
to become linkedin

with a voluntary community
less restrive than
the so called "plain" people,
unencumbered with materialistic trappings
whereby assignments delineated
governed jump-started
by age and gender at birth
men assigned physical tasks,
while women linkedin to domestic role,
members of the sect
know their role from cradle to grave.

Aside from delineating
responsibilities predicated
on whether an individual
child, teen, or adult,
their culture allows,
enables and provides
self reliant lifelong skill sets.