He could never walk his land without...
A poem.
He could never walk his land without
somehow tending it, too,
whether by truing up a fencepost,
boundary marker or sapling;
uprooting the invasive weeds
creeping along the pasture edge;
lifting a dead branch off the wire fence
tracing the line between pasture
and woodlot – or simply gazing
at the swell of it all, as if checking
a sleeping child's breathing.
Today he whistled for the horses,
then bent, his body a question mark,
and gently plucked from the soil
of the cow-cropped clover an
arrowhead, whole, and so point-perfect
it might have been chiseled that morning.
He slipped it in his pocket and
walked on, fingering its cherty edges
marveling at what he thought of as luck –
never once calculating the time he'd spent
walking his farm.
– Sue Wunder
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