The first time your arms get prickled by the rougher ends
learning to wear a long-sleeved shirt and gloves helps.
The binding scores into fingers when you lift and drag them,
it’s better to push them downhill to a flatter place and collect them later.
The heat makes you dizzy, lapsing sideways without going over.
Sweet orange cordial sticky on hands and down the shirtfront
shred clover brews in the air with the rye seed flying like grass midges,
until the ferment becomes greater than oxygen in your chest.
Resting on your sodden back the sky arches down
and your hands try to mould the plasticine of the day there,
a cloud in the shape of a monkey’s head says you’ll live forever here
as the slope catches the horizon in a dazy relay of afternoon.
The swathes of raked tunneled grass curl around the hills
where the tractor teddered the first cut to lay out the baler’s run.
You’ve got to get the tension right or they’ll string too loose
and fall apart as you try to pick them up.
The dog doesn’t get that its work and she trips you up,
catching your gum booted legs and sends you flying
ankle stalling and twisting between the mounds.
Tiring everyone starts to dawdle
playing with docks that wouldn’t be mowed between the chess board,
of rowed colours sliced out of the hill at different times as the moisture varied
and changed by shade to match the times of day.
Beneath the trees
wheat grass got away and the fallen branches keep machinery at bay,
clothes are dusty and the stalks cling with their arrow quills making a jumper
left behind what it can never be again.
You come up an ancient bronze from sticking your head in a water trough
fed from the clay dam slow water gravity run but cold,
and your eyes watch the algae and strip grass dance in the under land
that sits upside down gaudy above the hill.
Throwing your head back because your hair has grown too long
in the pause between pays and down your spine runs the tingle,
so cool at the base where your jeans have stuck to you
and now such a feeling of calm that the grass is cartoon maroon.
The last tonne is forty too many
after a thousand have been lifted and,
muscles turn to peanut butter where the strength was in the morning
when the mist half winked across the valley road
to where the slip showed a red dirt slide down to the river
as a butcher bird clapped its beak by your ear,
saying hello this is my space and don’t wander.
Socks slip down to heel and rub away the skin to whisper in your Godly blister
that harvest is over until tomorrow,
when you will be young enough to bring them in again.
Photo of Rose of Allambee, the wonder German Pointer. Snake charmer, glove collector, hay bundler, sense of humour – outrageous. Seventeen years of abandoned joy, even in her dreaming by the fire, her legs ran, taking a shoe from any pair to the highest paddock.
James Walton Poetry 