In August, Aunt Annie and the girls
stoked the wood stove for breakfast:
platters of fried eggs, bowls of oatmeal, toast,
homemade jellies, honey, fresh churned butter,
last night’s chicken stew

As the sun lit, the able boys and men
drank coffee, headed for fields
holding on to the backs of tractors

At nine, hungry again, dusty, itchy,
arms and faces scratched by then,
the women fed them sandwiches and fruit,
and at noon a big dinner of fried chicken,
tomatoes they gnawed like apples,
corn on the cob, pitchers of icy juice

In humid afternoons under brutal skies
they sat in the shade at three
for lemonade and cookies,
then bucked bales behind the Allis-Chalmers
pulling wooden wagons until dark,
and sat for supper in breezes on the porch

Uncle Del’s hay done, days later
they finished yonder neighbor’s fields

That was summer in the 1950s
when small farms were yet,
and we still muscled boys and men

On Sundays men folk fished the river;
old aunts rocked on porches between feeds,
sipping tea and coffee, giggling in girlhood
about ‘a courtin’

Autumn was time for fixing things,
afternoons for figuring profits, if any;
Aunt Annie at the kitchen table weeping to herself,
shuffling bills from the electric company,
Uncle Del puttering on tractors inside the barn
scented with burnished hay

Year round, they woke dazed
from dark, cold sleep,
relieving the pressure of cow’s teats,
scraping dung with shovels
from cement floors

The outhouse Sears catalogs were
little more than they had from God

The chores, always the chores,
ice ruts in the barnyard
carved by spring tractor tires,
below zero, early dawn

A potbellied stove in the kitchen
held them together, old looking at a young age;
crinkled, rough handed, wild as bulls,
they drove battered pickups at age eleven
on country roads where some rolled over
of an icy night, found next morning dead
and stiff as struck deer

In the morning in Missouri
leaning against a summer sycamore
in an ancient pasture of dry grass filled with
the click/chirp of locusts and crickets,
you can hear them, you can feel them,
in the morning in Missouri