Category: pasture

Waiting For Me to Say Something

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Because I have come to the fence at night,
the horses arrive also from their ancient stable.
They let me stroke their long faces, and I note
in the light of the now-merging moon

how they, a Morgan and a Quarter, have been
by shake-guttered raindrops
spotted around their rumps and thus made
Appaloosas, the ancestral horses of this place.

Maybe because it is night, they are nervous,
or maybe because they too sense
what they have become, they seem
to be waiting for me to say something

to whatever ancient spirits might still abide here,
that they might awaken from this strange dream,
in which there are fences and stables and a man
who doesn’t know a single word they understand.
~Robert Wrigley “After a Rainstorm” from Beautiful Country

During our three decades of Haflinger horse ownership, I figured out long ago that Haflingers must have a migration center in their brain that tells them that it is time to move on to other territory – a move based on quality of forage, the seasons, or maybe simply a sudden urge for a change in scenery. This thrifty mountain breed adapted over hundreds of years to living in rather sparse Alpen meadows. They needed to move on to another feeding area enmasse on a pretty regular basis, or when the weather was starting to get crummy.

Or perhaps the next valley over had a better view, who knows? Trouble is, my Haflingers seem to have the desire to “move to other pastures” even if the grass in their own territory is plentiful and the view is great. And there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of natural or man-made barrier that will discourage them.

I have a trio of geldings I dub the “Three Musketeers”) who are particularly afflicted with wanderlust. There is not a field yet that has held them when they decide together that it is time to move on. We are a hotwire and white tape fenced farm–something that has worked fairly well over the years, as it is inexpensive, easily repaired and best of all, easily moved if we need to change the fencing arrangement in our pasture rotation between five different 2 acre pastures.

Previous generations of Haflingers have tested the hotwire and learned not to bother it again. No problem.

But not the Three Musketeers.

They know when the wire is grounding out somewhere, so the current is low. They know when the weather is so dry that conduction is poor through the wire. They know when I’ve absent-mindedly left the fencer unplugged because I’ve had someone visit and we wanted to climb unshocked through the fences to walk from field to field.

These three actually have little conferences out in the field together about this. I’ve seen them huddled together, discussing their strategy, and fifteen minutes later, I’ll look out my kitchen window and they are in another field altogether and the wire and tape is strewn everywhere and there’s not a mark on any of them. Even more mysteriously, often I can’t really tell where they made their escape as they leave no trace–I think one holds up the top wire with his teeth and the others carefully step over the bottom wire. I’m convinced they do this just to make me crazy.

Last night, when I brought them in from a totally different field from where they had started in the morning, they all smirked at me as they marched to their stalls as if to say, “guess what you have waiting for you out there.” It was too dark to survey the damage last night but I got up extra early to check it out this morning before I turned them out again.

Sure enough, in the back corner of the field they had been put in yesterday morning, (which has plenty of grass), the tape had been stretched, but not broken, and the wires popped off their insulators and dragging on the ground and in a huge tangled mass. I enjoyed 45 minutes of Pacific Northwest summer morning putting it all back together. Then I put them out in the field they had escaped to last night, thinking, “okay, if you like this field so well, this is where you’ll stay”.

Tonight, they were back in the first field where they started out yesterday morning. Just to prove they could do it. They are thoroughly enjoying this sport. I’m ready to buy a grand poobah mega-wattage fry-their-whiskers fence charger.

But then, I’d be spoiling their fun and their travels. As long as they stay off the road, out of our garden, and out of my kitchen, they can have the run of the place. I too remember being afflicted with wanderlust, long long ago, and wanting to see the big wide world, no matter what obstacles had to be overcome or shocks I had to endure to get there. And I got there after all that trouble and effort and realized that home was really where I wanted to be.

Now, prying me away from my little corner of the world gets more difficult every year. I hope my Haflinger trio will eventually decide that staying home is the best thing after all. Maybe they will listen to what I have to say this time.

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Thoughtful Dripping Muzzles

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Let the end of all bathtubs
be this putting out to pasture
of four Victorian bowlegs
anchored in grasses.

Let all longnecked browsers
come drink from the shallows
while faucets grow rusty
and porcelain yellows.

Where once our nude forebears
soaped up in this vessel
come, cows, and come, horses.

Bring burdock and thistle,
come slaver the scum of
timothy and clover
on the cast-iron lip that
our grandsires climbed over

and let there be always
green water for sipping
that muzzles may enter thoughtful
and rise dripping.
~Maxine Kumin “Watering Trough” from Selected Poems

photo by Emily Vander Haak

Farmers became the original recyclers before it was a word or an expectation — there isn’t anything that can’t be used twice or thrice for whatever is needed, wherever and whenever, especially far from the nearest retail outlet or farm supply store.

The water troughs on the farm where I grew up were cast-off four-legged bath tubs hauled home from the dump, exactly like the old tub I bathed in when staying overnight at my grandma’s farm house.  She needed her tub to stay put right in the bathroom, never considering an upgrade and remodel; she would never offer it up to her cows.

But there were people who could afford to install showers and molded tubs so out their tubs went to find new life and purpose on farms like ours.

When I was a kid, we kept goldfish in our bathtub water trough, to keep the algae at bay and for the amusement of the farm cats. The horses and cows would stand idle, drowsing by the tub, their muzzles dripping, mesmerized by flashes of orange circling the plugged drain.

I often wondered what they thought of sharing their drinking water with fish, but I suspect they had more weighty things to ponder: where the next lush patch of grass might be, how to reach that belly itch,  and finding the best shade with fewest flies for that summer afternoon nap.

When it comes to sharing a tub, maybe farm animals aren’t that different from their farmer keepers after all: they both stand dripping and thoughtful alongside the tub, contemplating what comes next. After a long hot summer day, it may well be a well-earned rest.

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God’s Dust

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…war spreading,
families dying,
the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside,
sowing clover…
~Wendell Berry “February 2, 1968”

However you may come, 
You’ll see it suddenly
Lie open to the light
Amid the woods: a farm
Little enough to see
Or call across—cornfield,
Hayfield, and pasture, clear
As if remembered, dreamed
And yearned for long ago,
Neat as a blossom now
With all the pastures mowed
And the dew fresh upon it,
Bird music all around.
That is the vision, seen
As on a Sabbath walk:
The possibility
Of human life whose terms
Are Heaven’s and this earth’s.

The land must have its Sabbath
Or take it when we starve.
The ground is mellow now,
Friable and porous: rich.
Mid-August is the time
To sow this field in clover
And grass, to cut for hay
Two years, pasture a while,
And then return to corn.

This way you come to know
That something moves in time
That time does not contain.
For by this timely work
You keep yourself alive
As you came into time,
And as you’ll leave: God’s dust,
God’s breath, a little Light.
~Wendell Berry from The Farm

These are fragrant acres where
Evening comes long hours late
And the still unmoving air
Cools the fevered hands of Fate.

Meadows where the afternoon
Hangs suspended in a flower
And the moments of our doom
Drift upon a weightless hour.

And we who thought that surely night
Would bring us triumph or defeat
Only find that stars are white
Clover at our naked feet.
~Tennessee Williams “Clover”

Farming is daily work outside of the constraints of time –
labor done this day is caring for what is eternal,
despite weather, war, uncertainty.

There is a timelessness about summer:
the preparing and planting and preserving,
a cycle of living and dying repeating through generations.

We, like our farming forebears, will become God’s dust again.

I’m reminded, walking through our pasture’s clover,
I become seed and soil for the next generation.
Like a blossom so plain and unnoticed during its life,
I enfolds myself back to the ground, sighing and dying.

Perhaps it is the breath of clover
we should remember at the last,
as God’s own breath.

Inhale deeply of Him in the dust of the clover field.

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At Summer’s Pace

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Light and wind are running
over the headed grass
as though the hill had 
melted and now flowed.
~Wendell Berry “June Wind” from New Collected Poems

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.
~Philip Larkin “Cut Grass” from The Complete Poems

June is the month when grass grows abundantly.

Light and wind work magic on a field of flowing tall grass. The blades of the mower lay it to the ground in green streams that course up and down the slopes. It lies orderly in stoneless cemetery rows.

Farmer’s fields are lined with rows of mown grass, a precious commodity to be harvested for the livestock to eat the rest of the year. Some of the green is bagged up like big marshmallows for easy storage and some put in silos for later in the winter.

The grass’ death is critical to the life of the animals we raise.

What was once waving and bowing to the wind is cut and crushed:
no longer bending but bent,
no longer flowing but flown,
no longer growing but mown.

At summer’s pace, while the clouds saunter overhead, the grasses are stored as fodder for the beasts of the farm on those cold nights when the wind beats at the doors.

It will melt in their mouths. As we watch them chew, we’ll remember the overflowing abundance of summer in June.

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Warmness of Clover Breath

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To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.
~Wendell Berry “Enriching the Earth” from Collected Poems

It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer,
it was the warmness of clover breath.
Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes.
And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness
was held forever…
~Ray Bradbury from Dandelion Wine

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Emily Dickinson

Every autumn my father, an agriculture teacher by training, brought home gunny sacks of grass seed from the feed and seed store.  He would start up his 1954 Farmall Cub tractor, proceed to disc and harrow an acre of bare ground in our field, and then fill the seeder, distributing seed on the soil for his annual agronomy cover crop over winter growing experiment.  The little sprouts would wait to appear in the warming spring weather, an initial green haziness spread over the brown dirt, almost like damp green mold.  Within days they would form a plush and inviting velveteen green cushion, substantial enough for a little wiggle of blades in the breezes.  A few weeks later the cover would be a full fledged head of waving green hair, the wind blowing it wantonly, bending the stems to its will.  It was botanical pasture magic, renewable and marvelous,  only to be mowed and stubble turned over with the plow back into the soil as nutrition for the summer planting to come.  It was the sacrificial nature of cover crops to be briefly beautiful on top of the ground, but the foundational nurture once underground.

One spring the expected grassy carpet growth didn’t look quite the same after germination–the sprouts were little round leaves, not sharp edged blades.  Instead of identical uniform upright stems, the field was producing curly chaotic ovoid and spherical shapes and sizes. Clover didn’t abide by the same rules as grasses.  It had a mind of its own with a burgeoning and bumpy napped surface that didn’t bend with breezes, all its effort invested instead in producing blossoms.

A hint of pink one morning was so subtle it was almost hallucinatory.  Within a day it was unmistakeably reddening and real.  Within a week the green sea flowed with bobbing crimson heads. We had never seen such vibrancy spring from our soil before.  It exuded scented clover breath, the fragrance calling honey bees far and near.  True reverie.

The field of crimson dreams and sated honey bees lasted several weeks before my father headed back out on the Farmall to turn it under with the plow, burying the fading blossoms into the ground.  Their sacrifice bled red into the soil, their fragrant breath halted, their memory barely recognizable in the next summer crop germination.   Yet the crimson heads were there, feeding the growth of the next generation, deepening the green as it reached to the sun.

Such a sweet thing, alive a thousand summers hence in the soil.

What a beautiful feeling.

Crimson and clover, over and over.

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Fearsome Things to See

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Not much to me is yonder lane  
 Where I go every day;  
But when there’s been a shower of rain  
 And hedge-birds whistle gay,  
I know my lad that’s out in France
 With fearsome things to see  
Would give his eyes for just one glance  
 At our white hawthorn tree.

   .    .    .    .  

Not much to me is yonder lane  
 Where he so longs to tread:
But when there’s been a shower of rain  
I think I’ll never weep again  
 Until I’ve heard he’s dead.
~Siegfried Sassoon “The Hawthorn Tree”

I drove West
in the season between seasons.
I left behind suburban gardens.
Lawnmowers.  Small talk.

Under low skies, past splashes of coltsfoot,
I assumed
the hard shyness of Atlantic light
and the superstitious aura of hawthorn.

All I wanted then was to fill my arms with
sharp flowers,
to seem from a distance, to be part of
that ivory, downhill rush.  But I knew,

I had always known,
the custom was
not to touch hawthorn.
 Not to bring it indoors for the sake of

the luck
such constraint would forfeit–
a child might die, perhaps, or an unexplained
fever speckle heifers.  So I left it

stirring on those hills
with a fluency
only water has.  And, like water, able
to redefine land.  And free to seem to be–

for anglers,
and for travellers astray in
the unmarked lights of a May dusk–
the only language spoken in those parts.
~Eavan Boland “White Hawthorn in the West of Ireland”

The bird-sowed hawthorn bush along the lane to our back field has suddenly become a blooming tree, staking out its place alongside the trail the horses follow to their pasture. This May, it is a white flame against the dark woods.

Though we didn’t intend for it to be there, we’ll leave it be. Hawthorns are great bird habitat and a haven for honeybees. They are found in most hedge rows in the United Kingdom, impenetrable due to their fierce thorns and criss-cross network of branches, a historic symbol of the toughness and persistence of the Celtic people. Though we don’t need a hedge row here, I appreciate the tree’s reminder it has a place in myth and lore.

It will never be a hospitable tree like the lone fir tree that graces our hill, or the big leaf maple where children climb, or the black walnut whose branches support the treehouse. But it will be a white beacon every May, portending the summer to come, and if it bears fruit, it will feed the birds that nest in its interior.

And like the poem written by WWI soldier/poet Sassoon, it will be a bittersweet reminder of the familiar comfort of home, even though sharp thorns abound among the blossoms. Those thorns are nothing compared to the despair found in the fearsome trenches of warfare.

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Siegfried Sassoon’s handwritten poem

along fair Arran’s shores
the swans sing soft of tale of yore,
of a young love taken to sea

the two were hand in glove
like sparrows bound in sacred love
a tune that only they can sing

a tree of unity
they planted by the green eyed sea
the branch would hold their love through time

a sailor lad was he
he said,”dont cry my lovely, mhari
before the moon is full i’ll return”

I’ll wait for thee and she sang to him

the moon shone full and bright
and home he sailed mid-summers night
the tree so young and blossoming

they slept among the green
the world was light and dreams serene
the fires in their hearts burned bright

Where moss-grown boulders stand,
he took her by the lily hand
and there they wed at break of day

the seas know not of hearts
and once again the two must part.
“it wont be long, i swear to thee.

please wait for me.”
and she sang to him

The hawthorn tree has grown,
10 years she walked shores alone,
she hears his whisper in the leaves

Home is the sailor lad,
home in the sea, forever plaid,
Under the wide and starry sky

Yes, I will wait for thee,
By mountain, sea and tree;
And on the wind you’ll hear my love,

for at the fall of day
Beneath the leaves where once we lay
I’ll sit and sing i’ll wait for thee

come back to me….
music and lyrics by Fae Wiedenhoeft

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Only the Light Moves

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Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, 
and by degrees 
the forms and colours of things are restored to them, 
and we watch the dawn 
remaking the world in its antique pattern.
~Oscar Wilde from The Picture of Dorian Gray

Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
~William Wordsworth from “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”

Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. 
Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.
~Leonora Carrington

Looking for God is the first thing and the last,
but in between so much trouble, so much pain.
~Jane Kenyon from “With the Dog at Sunrise”

In the moments before dawn
when glow gently tints
the inside of horizon’s eyelids,
the black of midnight
wanes to mere shadow,
the fear of night forgotten.

Gloaming dusk transposed to gleaming dawn,
its backlit silhouettes stark
as a dark hurting earth
slowly opens her eyes
to greet a new and glorious morn.

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The Neon Night

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Tonight his airplane comes in from the West,
and he rises from his seat, a suitcoat slung
over his arm. The flight attendant smiles
and says, “Have a nice visit,” and he nods
as if he has done this all before,
as if his entire life hasn’t been 170 acres
of corn and oats, as if a plow isn’t dragging
behind him through the sand and clay,
as if his head isn’t nestling in the warm
flank of a Holstein cow.

Only his hands tell the truth:
fingers thick as ropes, nails flat
and broken in the trough of endless chores.
He steps into the city warily, breathing
metal and exhaust, bewildered by the
stampede of humanity circling around him.
I want to ask him something familiar,
something about tractors and wagons,
but he is taken by the neon night,
crossing carefully against the light.
~Joyce Sutphen “My Father Comes to the City” from Straight Out of View.

Photo by Abby Mobley

I’ve lived a mostly quiet farm life over the last four years – minimized air travel and avoided big cities, as I was never fond of either even before COVID. Flying recently to visit family reminded me how challenging it is for me to get used to large crowds again, navigating unfamiliar urban highways and sitting with a hundred people in a winged metal tube 35,000 feet in the air.

But even farmers have to leave home once in a while. We shake the mud off our boots and brush the hayseeds from our hair, and try to act and be presentable in civilized society.

But my nervousness remains, knowing I’m out of my comfort zone, continually yearning for the wide open spaces of home.

Travel will take some getting used to again, but there is a world to be explored out there. It’s time to see how the city’s neon night compares with one illuminating barn light on the farm.

Ye Winged Seraphs Fly: Standing Ready

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Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close
   emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics,
   had ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—
   innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,
The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful
   face.
~Walt Whitman “The First Dandelion”

As the days warm and lengthen, the grass
is getting happy almost overnight.
Under my window the first star of spring
opens its eye on the front lawn. Yellow
as butter, it is only one. But it is one,
and in the nature of things, and like
the multiple asterisks seeding the night sky,
it will flourish and take over every
grassy bank in town. I long to be prolific
as the dandelion, spinning pale parachutes
of words, claiming new territory by
the power of fluff. The stars in their courses
have bloomed an unending glory
across the heavens, but here in my yard
a local constellation prepares to launch
multiple, short-lived, radiant coronas
to proclaim the new-sprung season.
~Luci Shaw “Dandelion”

This dandelion has long ago surrendered its golden petals, and has reached its crowning stage of dying – the delicate seed-globe must break up now – it gives and gives till it has nothing left.

The hour of this new dying is clearly defined to the dandelion globe:  it is marked by detachment.  There is no sense of wrenching:  it stands ready, holding up its little life, not knowing when or where or how the wind that bloweth where it listeth may carry it away.

It holds itself no longer for its own keeping, only as something to be given; a breath does the rest…
~Lillias Trotter from  “Parables of the Cross”

It is spring: soon a field of new dandelions will stand ready in full-puff; their seeds detach as I walk through, flying to their next life.

My own readiness feels very much like the peak of labor in childbirth,
a moment feeling as if time has stopped –
an inevitability that one can never go back to the way things were.

This “crowning” of the new life as it emerges means the surrender and emptying of the old life.

So, like the dandelion, I turn my face full on to the breeze, giving and releasing, until I have nothing left.

Only then – only then – is there a moment of detachment,
a flying to whatever is next,
leading me to eternity.

Now finish the work, so that your eager willingness to do it may be matched by your completion of it, according to your means.
2 Corinthians 8:11

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”

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Laid Aside His Crown: Help Me Push Myself Aside

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I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
~R.S. Thomas “A Bright Field”

The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. 
If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever 
I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts
after any lunatic at all. 

But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought.

The literature of illumination reveals this above all: 
although it comes to those who wait for it, 
it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, 
a gift and a total surprise.

I return from one walk knowing where
the killdeer nests in the field by the creek
and the hour the laurel blooms. 
I return from the same walk a day later
scarcely knowing my own name.

Litanies hum in my ears; 
my tongue flaps in my mouth. 
Ailinon, alleluia!
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to.
You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see
and my self is the earth’s shadow
that keeps me from seeing all the moon.
The crescent is very beautiful
and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see;
but what I am afraid of, dear God,
is that my self shadow will grow so large
that it blocks the whole moon,
and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.

I do not know You God
because I am in the way.
Please help me to push myself aside.
~Flannery O’Connor from A Prayer Journal

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God…
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I am learning to step aside so my own shadow stops obscuring God’s gift of illumination. I can be so blinded by discouragement, busyness and distraction that I lose sight of God Himself.

I stand in the way and need a push to let the Light shine forth.

Surprise me, dear Lord. Cram this common bush with heaven. 

Though I regularly lament in the shadows, help me lift my voice in praise and gratitude for your gift: the pearl of great price you generously hold for me to find each day.

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.
Matthew 13: 44

This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”

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