Seeds on Hard Ground
- Sep 29, 2022
- 2 min read
★★★★☆
Originally published in collaboration with photographer Michael O’Brien as Hard Ground, creating “a portrait of homelessness that impels us to look into the eyes of people who live ‘on the hard ground’ and recognize our common humanity,” Tom Waits’s poems from it were collected and issued as this chapbook, Seeds on Hard Ground, to raise money for San Francisco Bay Area organizations providing vital services to people in need. Being both a fan of Waits and one to support a good cause, I bought a copy, put it on the shelf, and somehow managed to leave it untouched for the next eleven years. I rediscovered it while sorting through boxes of books in preparation for yet another move (shockingly, eleven times since 1999, with one more to go until we are in our new house) and pulled it aside to finally read.
I’ve now read Seeds on Hard Ground five or six times, the last time a little more than a week ago. It’s 10 pages long and formatted as a single poem broken up into stanzas. In Hard Ground the work was presented as individual poems and, by my rough count, there are 23 herein. The first reading didn’t amount to much. Waits is first and foremost a musician and it was impossible not to read the words in a light-hearted and sing-songy way (or hear them in his gravelly voice). Subsequent readings over the next couple of weeks didn’t completely dispel the work’s musicality, but I no longer felt compelled to turn the words into song. What emerged, however, was that Waits had tapped into a range of thoughts and feelings—humor, despair, weariness, hope—that brought life and, as was the aim of Hard Ground, humanity to people we often do our best to avoid thinking too much about.
Reading Waits’s words without the accompanying photographs allowed me to visualize the lives behind them, and I wonder if it was more compelling to let my imagination create the pictures or if the two paired together as originally published would have been more powerful. In any case, I don’t think too many people are thinking much about this poem all these years later, nor, I suspect, is Tom Waits. Nor I, most likely, had I read this when it was originally published. Still, there is something compelling going on in Seeds on Hard Ground that I can’t quite put my finger on. Is it the simplicity? The innocence? Perhaps it’s that, though about a serious subject with real lives at stake, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Sometimes levity can open the door to thought and engagement in a way that gravity cannot. After all, I’m thinking about homelessness more now than I likely ever have, and, if nothing else, isn’t that everything and more we might hope for from a poem?
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