Ode to Soils and Society, Winter 2020 Term*

Extensive yet hidden to shallows or depths
Teeming with seen and unseen critters,
Cycling that from above, downward
Then upward again via tentacles like Hydra’s curls.
For food, fiber, forage, and fuel crops
Necessary to groups or individuals, all wanting MORE!

These wanting hordes toil, turn, and till you over/under
For unending millennia, as long as they can.
Sometimes rudely undressed you are by cruel floods and landslides
Revealing oranges/yellows to dark reds/browns
Or creams to white-as-snow leached horizons.

How do we know you best, provider to All?
Whether animal, plant, fish, or fowl—many or few?
Will you endure to an endless future, eons away?
Or perish more quickly than imagined by fallacy
And uncaring overuse, abuse, and mistreatment?

These were questions explored in SOIL 511
Week by slow week, topic by topic, discussion by assignment
Seeking that which we should know but do not.
Together or alone, tell us your secrets dear:
Hold particles together in tender embraces;
Store and cycle nutrients to friends above/below;
Support organisms, large to small, that enrich your earthly stores.

How do we know you? Study you? Interpret your riches?
Step by step…Day by day…Always onward…Searching and forever learning…

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<< Leon H. Liegel: Soil 511 Reflection; 22 March 2020 >>
Artist Statement: “We know soils not only by our five human senses but by personal emotions and feelings.”