Elegy for a Hay Rake
Rent from DeepDyve- Elegy for a Hay Rake
To every thing its season, and to every toolits final turn; to the Farmhand rake my fatherbought hard-used in 1976, rust has eaten awayall your labels, all your sheen and simple function;to what I hope is my last sight of you, unhitchedand standing in the field like a photographfrom the Great Depression; farewell to the cut hay leftscattered on the ground to rot, nothing ate youbut the soil that birthed you; to the tractor tirethose long grappling points missed by incheson every sharp turn, you survived without puncture;to the long afternoon hours spent digging clumpsout of the baler's clenched teeth, good moneycannot buy you back; so long to the lucky machine,lucky I won't sell you as an antique, that no one willpaint you red, white, and blue and plant you in a garden,or hang you on a restaurant wall; goodbye to the fiveleaning wheels, their crooked tines turning, reaching uplike broken fingers to wave hello, hello, goodbye. [End Page 102]
Jesse Graves grew up at Sharp's Chapel, Tennessee, a community settled by his ancestors in the Eighteenth Century. His first poetry teacher at the University of Tennessee was Connie Jordan Green who introduced him to Jeff Daniel Marion and to the poetry of Wendell Berry. Graves studied under Robert Morgan at Cornell Univeristy and now teaches at East Tennessee State University.
