Todd Boss
The Farmer Speaks to Her Children of Work
And the farmer’s children, weary from the fields in the middle of a
long, straight windrow, cry:
Speak to us of work, and why we have to do it,
And the mother reaches for the appropriate memorized chapter of
Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet and clears her throat,
And the angels of that village gather round as she quotes, errorlessly, in
the imperious tone she reserves for reciting poetry:
You work that you may keep pace with the Earth, and the soul of the
Earth, etc., as it is written,
But lo, it does little good, for the kids continue to complain of itching
clothes, and their red hay-fevered, watering eyes, with much rending of
garments and throwing down of gloves, so vexed are they,
And interrupt her vociferously, refusing to do another lick of a chore
not of their choosing in the humid hundred-degree heat of mid-July (their
friends all gathered at the river, sprayed by waterfalls), while the John
Deere baler kicks dusty 60-pound twine-wrapped hunks of harvest at them
where they climb among the others they’ve already stacked on that flat-
bed wagon:
Why! they plead through tears—
So she shifts gears, tries a smile, and summons from the cloudless sky a
length of Lutheran hymnody they too know by heart by now:
Hark the voice of Jesus crying, who will go and work today?
Fields are ripe and harvests waiting; who will bear the sheaves away?
Loud and long the mother calleth bundled lines of poetry:
Who will answer, gladly saying, “Here am I, send me, send me?”
And thereupon the children settle back into a rhythm not unlike the one
that rocks their laden wagonload to the barn’s packed-earth approach,
Up which ramp, crookedly, heavily, backwards,
Into the mow’s hushed cathedral tent,
The rewards of generations of labors went.
The tractor knocks dead,
And an 80-acre blessing of silence sloshes over the canopies of the
farmyard trees, and stays—restorative and sweet on the breeze as the slug
from a jug of ice-cold lemonade.
Wordlessly they worship in that barn-swallow-swept shade till the work
is done, the weary wooden wagon empty, and another winter month’s
worth of livestock feed stored away like faith won the hard way. Like
money made but saved. Like seed.