The Farmer's Wife

[Sebby]

I wrote this one a couple years ago, after reading about a repeated incident in an LC biography.




The Farmer’s Wife


The farmer’s wife,
perhaps with a hint of a smile
on her wind-hardened face,
traces her willowy hands
through the work-stained apron
that covers her solid frame.


She has but one word
for the marauding poets,
stranded by the highway, laughing.
consecutive trips find them wanting…
what with opening the cosmos
with their wakening words,
they drove on in the midnight dark,
not stopping for the needed fuel
that would bring them to their now-forgotten destiny.

Running a hand across her weary brow,
she sighs,
looks to a sky not yet bruised
to the plum of dawn.
“Poets!” she exclaims
with a weariness bred of morning labour.

She walks away from the door,
leaving Layton to lean on its splintery frame,
while Cohen, sitting still in the dew
of his wakening mind, titters,
unable to believe the fortune
of landing, yet again,
on this kind woman’s porch.

Poets traveling onward of a night
can never be trusted
to find their distant shore…
but a beacon in dust,
a work-weary Mother of men,
they will trip upon lightly,
She, a harvest of needful things,
brought forth by the patron saint
resurrected to protect
the flighty of mind,
the absent men of omnipotent vision,
and masters of words un-spun.