Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Wednesday
One of the best things to come out of our trip to Ireland last spring was being introduced to the poetry of Patrick Kavanaugh. Here’s a joyous September poem he wrote as he nostalgically recalls working with neighboring farms during harvest season.
I showed the poem to my wife, who was raised on a small farm in southeast Iowa, and she said it captures the experience perfectly. In her case, her own family would combine efforts with her two uncles, along with a couple of other farm families. They would move from farm to farm, and Julia recalls taking on different tasks at different ages, from driving the tractor that lifted the hay bales to collecting the hay bales in the field to receiving and stacking the bales in the barn.
When Kavanagh talks about how “we owed them a day at the threshing since last year” and how “it was a delight to be paying bills of laughter and chaffy gossip in kind,” Julia says he is spot on. She remembers the men making slightly off-color jokes, which the children barely understood. “Chaffy gossip” is a wonderful way to describe the dialogue—almost light as air and filling the atmosphere.
And then there was the “work thrown in to ballast the fantasy-soaring mind.” The work made it real, giving substance to the communal good feelings.
Julia tells me that Kavanagh’s sense that he was entering heaven’s (haggard) gate to a kind of paradise –“no earthly estate”–is no exaggeration. Being an integral part of a family and communal enterprise gave her a strong sense of being important. “Lost in unthinking joy” was what it felt like.
On an Apple-Ripe September Morning
By Patrick Kavanagh
On an apple-ripe September morning
Through the mist-chill fields I went
With a pitch-fork on my shoulder
Less for use than for devilment.
The threshing mill was set-up, I knew,
In Cassidy’s haggard last night,
And we owed them a day at the threshing
Since last year. O it was delight
To be paying bills of laughter
And chaffy gossip in kind
With work thrown in to ballast
The fantasy-soaring mind.
As I crossed the wooden bridge I wondered
As I looked into the drain
If ever a summer morning should find me
Shoveling up eels again.
And I thought of the wasps’ nest in the bank
And how I got chased one day
Leaving the drag and the scraw-knife behind,
How I covered my face with hay.
The wet leaves of the cocksfoot
Polished my boots as I
Went round by the glistening bog-holes
Lost in unthinking joy.
I’ll be carrying bags to-day, I mused,
The best job at the mill
With plenty of time to talk of our loves
As we wait for the bags to fill.
Maybe Mary might call round…
And then I came to the haggard gate,
And I knew as I entered that I had come
Through fields that were part of no earthly estate.
