Memories from Undiscovered Country

Missouri Barn

Marion’s Barn

James Hart 

To him it was work’s wooden chapel
for harvest hours, harmonies of hay,
a rustic nave of shadowed spaces
supported by poles and able beams
the size of trees, native walnut logs
shaped by ancestors’ blistered hands
wielding sharpened axes, adze marks
showing the care they gave to square
their work in a day’s book of hours.
His pride was self-evident in their
hand-hewn finesse, pegs’ perfections
whittled round and fully filling holes,
the straight battens making the walls
airtight as a tomb, too tight almost
for crews of boys stacking hay high
under the roof’s embracing wings,
floor solid as earth suspended in air.
It is the peace of dust and darkness
I remember there, my sweat mixing
a communion of skin and clover pollen,
a darkness on my face and aching arms
undiminished in the darkness of the loft,
air alive with heaven’s heat, exhaling hay,
clover and brome rising in towered squares,
loose masonry of twine and shrouded grass,
blisters on my hands as sore as any of those
who shaped their days’ sacred space to hold
the harvest of time’s able hands and took
their eternal rest in white clover’s shroud
beside the church they raised for God.

(From an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)

Photo Source:

http://ralphsbike.blogspot.com/2011/05/riding-400k-through-night.html