"Lonely for the Country": Haikus for a Heifer

Tuesday at 7 pm was the last session of our winter-to-spring poetry zoom class "Touched by Words: The Companionship of Poets", and I am sorrier than I can describe to know that next Tuesday I won't be "gathering at the table" with my companions of the last six weeks. The first week our course facilitator, Tim, had requested that each of us describe a table that held significance in our lives. By the end of the exercise, I felt like we would all be welcome at any of those tables.

This is the second "Touched by Words" course I have taken. Tim sends out a folder of poems he has chosen for us to receive that week; and to conclude this course, he asked each of us to bring a poem to the class. Because there would be 16 poems, we would take the last two weeks in order to be able to discuss them and to reflect on their impact on our minds and hearts.

I chose this one:

Lonely for the Country, by Bronwen Wallace

Sometimes these days
you think you are ready
to settle down.

This might be the season for it,
this summer of purple sunsets
when you stand in the streets
watching the sky, until its colour
is a bruised place
inside your chest.

When you think of settling down
you imagine yourself growing comfortable
with the land and remember the sustained faces
of men like your grandfather, the ridges of black veins
that furrowed the backs of their hands as they squared
a county boundary for you, or built once more
old Stu McKenzie’s barn exactly as they’d raised it
60 years ago.
You watch the hands of the women
on market days, piling onions, filling buckets
with tomatoes, their thick, workaday gestures
disclosing at times
what you think you recognize as caring,
even love.

At least that’s how it looks
from the outside and when you think
of settling down, you always think of it
as a place.

It makes the city seem imaginary, somehow.
As you drive through the streets,
you begin to see how the lives there look
as if they had been cut from magazines:
a blond couple carrying a wicker picnic-basket
through the park, a man in faded brown shorts
squatting on his front lawn
fixing a child’s red bike.

You wish you could tell yourself
that this is all too sentimental.
You want to agree with the person
who said, “There’s no salvation
in geography.”

But you can’t
and you’re beginning to suspect
that deep within you,
like a latent gene, is this belief
that we belong somewhere.

What you know
is that once you admit that
it opens in you
a deeper need.
A need like that loneliness
which makes us return again and again
to the places we shared
with those we can no longer love,
empty-hearted, yet expectant,
searching for revelations
in the blank faces of remembered houses.

As wide as bereavement
and dangerous,
it renders us innocent
as mourners at a graveside
who want to believe their loss
has made this holy ground
and wait
for the earth beneath their feet
to console them.

Wallace, Bronwen. “Lonely for the Country.” Common Magic. Canada: Oberon Press, 1985.

I shared with the group that it seems like I have always been looking for a place to call my home. And in pondering this poem, I had come to the realisation that maybe the physical land location is not as important as the settling of the foundation in my heart and spirit. 

I was the third one to read. I gave a heads up that I might have to leave and give the Good Rancher a hand with a small heifer who was going a little bit crazy. He had brought her into the calving shed and I had visited her before class. She had been lowing, darting around her pen; somehow my voice calmed her down. 

"If you do leave, come back and let us know how it went - give us a haiku poem!"

It ended up that the GR did text me and I joined him at the squeeze, where he had already managed to walk the distressed little heifer. He had examined her and feared that the calf inside her was dead. 

He was stripped down to his shirt sleeves and jeans and bare hands. I used my phone as a flashlight and steadied the calf puller and held the chain wrapped round the miniature foot. I had managed to grab one glove so at least my hand was protected from the frozen metal.

It was -11° plus wind chill. The howling wind made a mockery of the first-time mother's keening and dashed the brittle tears from my face. "Another half minute and my hands will be frozen," I heard the GR mutter. "The main thing now is to save the mother. She's a good little heifer." Right then she lurched, going down. Somehow my voice reached her and she staggered to her feet again.

Long minutes followed as the GR pulled and the heifer pushed; into the beam of the cellphone the tiny, lifeless head finally appeared.

She was so pretty.

The GR walked the little heifer - perfectly calm now - back to the pen with blind Liesl and two other heifers getting close to delivery. She immediately went to drink water and then started in on the hay. He came back to gather up her baby's body. "She was just too small," he told me. "She went into labour too early." His teeth were chattering. I gathered his vest and jacket and gloves and carried them back to the house. 

The class was in the waning minutes of our time together. I debated not reentering the group. There was a discussion going on about Curtis's poetic offering. Maybe if I just stay quietly in the background ... I thought to myself. 

Someone noticed I was back and asked how it went with the calf. Others chimed in. I gulped. 5-7-5 syllables for Haiku, I thought to myself. "I will try a Haiku," I said.

Calf too small to live
[something about freezing air]
Human skin is numb

Silence ensued; I felt, through the zoom screen, sorrow.

And I also felt this: Heard. Held. Home.

Tim read us a final blessing to our time together. Everyone dispersed quietly.

I sat still for a few minutes and a couple of weak haikus came to me, my offering for the valiant little heifer and her first calf.

Calf too young to live
Night freezes, above us stars
Human heart is numb

The bleak midwinter
Dead baby; save the mother
All creation groans

Still think home's a place?
Your shaking voice brings comfort
Maybe you've arrived

[a nod to Bronwen Wallace's poem:]
Settling down, a place
A bruised place inside your chest - 
We belong somewhere

The final words Tim had read to send us on our way were from a poem that had come to him for the second session. As he read the last two lines tonight, though, he changed the pronouns. I felt he did that for me, and for the remarkable fellow farmers in our group. Who knew there would be such a gathering of us - a furrow of farmers, perhaps?! -  in this class and how frequently our time together these past weeks would be dotted with references to this form of heartbreaking, heartfilling, stewardship to which we have been branded?  

Listening Deeply, by Dick Allen

Listening deeply,
sometimes - in another - you can hear
the sound of a hermit, sighing
as he climbs a mountain trail to reach a waterfall
or a buddhist nun reciting prayers
while moonlight falls through the window onto an old clay floor,
and once in a while a child
rolling a hoop through the alleyways of Tokyo, laughing,
or a farmer, pausing in a rice field to watch geese fly,
the thoughts on her lips she doesn't think to say.

A true benedicta.

Sorrow shared is halved
New friends, old table, comfort
Tonight - I am home