All Flesh Is Grass
The days passed quickly, back then,
though some hours lingered in that hot
hospital room, waiting, watching my father.
Awake, he’d talk about the farm, go over
the pattern of the fields, their names.
I’ve an old photo of him in the lane,
with his own father, already white haired,
a dog and the horse yoked to a cart –
dad aged fourteen, when he escaped school
at the earliest age he could, for the farm.
Too young for the war, he’d work there
till he retired. After the naming of the fields
he’d tell me the right way to make hay,
when to cut the grass – green to keep
the sweetness in the stem, how to turn it, dry it,
store it well. Till the end his lawn was perfection.
He’d ask my sister to read him verses, psalms –
sustained to the end, keeping the sweetness within.
Mending Hedges
I remember coming home from school
dropped off at the roadside by bus
walking up the long winding lane
to find you sitting there in the hedge.
Mending it, to keep the cattle in the field.
You had learned how in your youth
at the shoulder of your own father
and now thirty – forty – years on you’d
bend just the right young branches,
those supple enough to move,
using a knife with a short blade
to cut the bark, stripping it back.
You also knew how to take one
of the discarded twigs, trimmed
back where the growth was in
the wrong direction, and with a few more
slices to bark, then whittling the core,
you’d hand across a penny whistle,
its pungent smell so sharp and green,
tasting of sap and spring life rising.
That whistle would be short-lived.
Not so the hedge, where green shoots
linked with your v-shaped notches
would plug the gap with a living lattice
that would strengthen as it grew.
“Mending Hedges” was first published in Poetry Scotland, Autumn 2022.
Making Hay
memories of summertime, making hay
whether the sun shone or not,
in the flatter fields where tractors could
pull the disc mower, the tedder,
to wuffle or aerate the grass for quicker drying
the rotating rakes pulling it into those
long wind-rows for pick up by the baler
my dad told me that the best hay is made
when grass is cut before the seed head forms
when the stalk’s supple, to keep all its goodness
dad made his first hay with hand-held scythes
and tedding rakes, and a horse pulling a cart
and then came tractors – the wee Massey Ferguson,
the good old Davy Brown, a true workhorse.
Despite the machines still back breaking work.
I loved the bale counter on the back of the baler,
counting up as each pale gold sweet smelling
rectangular bale popped out onto the ground
those bales were stacked in stooks,
small teepee shapes that we, as children,
played around, until they had dried enough
to bring back to the hayshed, loaded in rows
onto the back of the low flat trailer
and we’d ride back atop the load of five
or sometimes six rows of bales
only a quarter mile drive along the the road
from field to shed in the late summer gloaming,
which could be after eleven o’clock at night,
a family affair filled with cousins,
uncles and variety of hangers on.
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(Photo: 70023venus2009/ flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
- All Flesh is Grass and Other Poems by Emily Tee - June 13, 2024