During those long and gloomy years, the plough was often left to rot in the furrow, and faint and few were the encroachments made upon the forest. The fattest of the herd and the finest of the wheat were brought forth, too often without expectation of pecuniary recompense, to be sacrificed on the altar of political liberty.
The blood-brown scape
of another town lop-crossed
under low skies, the cold seethe
of another day in its begins—
farms circled
by the slabs of November. The world
is an engine of unmaking. In every vine-wall of knots
we recognize ourselves. Standing
in the mud yard we seem hardly to exist.
With only the nonsense games of children
we arrive at the gutted rabbit,
the ash-downed house. The meadow
clings soakingly with its soft teeth,
the sky
is a pail of cinders and—what is worse—a pail of cinders
is the sky.
In a swale of crabgrass waits the calf, eyes
lolling toward a vague middle distance
of vanished mother.
There is no weather coming which is not
already here, nothing new
under the vanished sun
as our daughters march to the well
to pull a day’s water,
as our sons
war
crude shares into the earth. My own boy
is studying something he has found.
He looks at the earth. I watch him. I too
have a craft
to tack against the wind.