The fields are mowed and gathered, quiet now,
farming work.The farmer dismounts and using
his silk white shirt across his chest,
and face, it becomes a towel, closing gate,
a last look as a salute. Early morning
I look down the inclined fields, golden,
a few picking birds, the cat waiting beside
the tree trunk for a field mouse in search of home.
From my hermitage cottage hillside, I recall,
the wide expanse, the film Oklahoma, the cowboy
on his prairie horse, A revenant?
‘O what a beautiful morning’,
‘there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow’,
my father, in his thirties singing,
downstairs in the kitchen
as he prepared to go to his chemist shop,
his prairie.
I am older now than he was then.
My prairie, a pastoral pasture,
for rounding up without corall.
A branding at baptism, the lasoo
of need.
Though he now in Elysian fields of corn,
somewhere at the meadow of the River Styx.
the songs continues on,
‘ o what a beautiful morning’.
Memory waits to uncoil,
like cut grass gathered for the meal.
‘The farmer and the cowman must be friends’.
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