Threshing

Evening shines waning green and reddening gold.

Singing its light-spraying stone-song, the flat-stone stream

trembles its clarity as we work on nearby.

My ear defenders block the jewelled flow of sounds.

The heavens take the haze from the thresher’s engine.

And as the tank takes grain from the auger’s helix,

the noise takes the sounds of the birds picking the fields.

I thirst - deaf Odysseus on his tortured raft.

From the old rickyard I see the big buck rabbit.

Hard-edged sunlight through the gape of doors clarifies.

The barn’s threshing floor is like the stream’s clear stone bed.

He huddles gathered listless into utter gloom.

Yellow-white viscous slime pusses his swollen eyes.

I lift him. He has lumps. His drowning lungs gurgle.

He trembles in mortal fear and then wets himself.

I live with the non-sense of unfeeling nature -

our bee-loved lime tree left a gale-storm’s broken bones.

But no lullaby words can soothe this away: Man

hid cruel horror in this buck’s gorsey wilderness.

Down, he burs behind the helve of a bezzled axe.

On his pain the gods of science look down unmoved.