This is the heart of the farm where I was born,
This farmhouse framed in remembered feelings of home,
Here is the window where first the sun spied me,
Here are the elm trees that told me about the wind.
I stand in the yard where once in imitation
Of my father’s six-horse team on the big gang plow
I hitched our collie dog to my baby cart
Which he overturned and licked my face when I cried.
I think how many autumns the leaves have fallen,
How my folk have fallen, and friends and neighbors too
Have loosened their hold on time and drifted away
Leaving the work of their hands for me to remember.
Here is the hoe my grandfather often used
Until it wore down thin as an iron shaving,
Here is the rug grandmother wove and kept
When she went upstairs to die on her walnut bed.
And the rose an aunt had painted, the raffia wreaths
Hung on the walls to be used as picture frames,
The copy of ‘‘Snowbound’’ faded and gently worn
That belonged with the apples and fire to a winter night.
I lay my hands on the Bible, heavy and black,
That spoke to me sternly on Sundays about my sins,
So that I had a solemn face as I did the chores
And wondered if I could be trusted another week.
The hitching post is gone and the stepping block.
The view from the window is changed, the trees have grown,
They bury in shade the porch where mother planted
A rambler rose to surround each ornate post.
The lawn seems shrunken where once my cousins played
At forbidden games as well as hide-and-seek,
And how they admired my father who let them ride
An old plow horse that was very suspicious of children.
The horse has melted to earth but the mouldy saddle
Still hangs in the barn, I tremble to think how things
Outlive the hands that used them, they speak to me
In the voice of a teacher echoing down the years.
The fields remember the past where children knee-deep
In shooting stars saw ditches drain the sloughs
Now fenced and fertile but rimmed by the same horizons,
A land known by the signature of the plow.
If the roots of the present seem reaching down to the past,
The upthrusting plants insert their tips in my heart,
For this is the earth where I grew in sunshine and storm
And learned from rocks to bear time’s leveling blows.
My sister and brothers and I mocked the farm’s slow pulse
Locked deep in our veins when the sun awarded us shadows,
But it keeps its account in stray sheaves pledged to the gleaner
From a stubble field green-leaved in our early season.
