A Lifted Life of Leisure

[YaMarVa]

Poem IX

A lifted life of leisure
I walk with you in ways
I never could have imagined
While toiling those dusted plains.

We sought, heft hard
To pass our tide,
Often falling short.
The good lord takes his due
In vengeance,
Through nature’s dyer part.

The farmland that we claimed
Infested stock did not sustain
To quell our hungry hearts
Or bleed our restless souls.
As passions of the past
Are buried
In the bowels of cemetery graves.
In defense of man,
The land was heaven sent.

Yet,
Had I have foreseen
Such gaunt misery,
Might I'd riddled these plains
Over more western land?
But now I stand
A leisure man of means
Bred up by coarse poverished hands
It is what exhaled me.

Not given to the dandy,
Or Shirley Temple girls
Stoic laborers, we gave our chance
That wilted world we weaned.

The grand city-scape
Our venture called
With a chance we could redeem.
Not by happenstance,
Our skills stood strong
To serve to building masses.
Poring foundations of concrete
Lapsed our family from entrapment;

The dusted fields I jest upon
Wafts my past away.
A lifted life of Lesure,
How I pass my time
Today.

I don't mind the word choice here so much. Words exist to be used. Whether or not someone knows the definition of a word isn't really relevant. That's what we have dictionaries for. However, there seem to be several grammatical and semantic or orthographical oddities in the text.

The strangest ones being:

Had I have foreseen
Such gaunt misery,
Might I'd riddled these plains
Over more western land?

"I have had foreseen" is not a grammatical English construction. It is "I had foreseen," inverted "Had I foreseen..."

"Might I'd riddled..."
Now, I don't know if by "I'd" you mean "I had" or "I would," but it doesn't matter, because the formation is still strange. "I had might riddled," "I would might riddled." Or "Might I had riddled..." These are not English constructions. The proper constructions for this context are:

"Had I foreseen
such gaunt misery,
Might I have riddled these plains
Over more western land?"

Or, if written all out "If I had foreseen such gaunt misery, might I have riddled these plains over more western land?"

Now for the orthographical/semantic problems:

"dyer" - Maybe this is supposed to be "dire." I don't know what it could be otherwise, other than "one who dyes." But that doesn't work in the context.

"poverished" - Maybe this is supposed to be "impoverished." I don't even think "poverished" is a word. I couldn't find it in any online dictionary and I even looked for the alleged verb form of it, which would be "poverish."

"poring" - Maybe this is supposed to be "pouring." I don't think "poring" is a word either, unless there is some verb that has been made out of "pore."

Lastly, I don't know what "heft hard" means. I couldn't make the two words make sense together when I looked up "heft" in the dictionary. But I am not really counting this one in with the other things I listed, because I have never seen the word "heft" before and I'm not familiar with how it is to be used in context.

Thanks for the exacting review, I appreciate your time spent….

‘Have’ should read ‘Had I foreseen’
Dire is correct too.
Poverished, I guess I made it up then, and I am sticking with it.
Pour is correct also.

Editing clearly is not my strong point, as I am new to poetry and writing as a whole (this was my 9th poem).
I will take more time to review and check proper spelling and grammar prior to posting - although writing it is the fun part, I am not in this for serious pursuits.