The Mown Meadow Poem by Bernard Kennedy

The fields are mowed and gathered, quiet now,
farming work.The farmer dismounts and using
his silk white shirt across his chest,
and face, it becomes a towel, closing gate,
a last look as a salute. Early morning
I look down the inclined fields, golden,
a few picking birds, the cat waiting beside
the tree trunk for a field mouse in search of home.

From my hermitage cottage hillside, I recall,
the wide expanse, the film Oklahoma, the cowboy
on his prairie horse, A revenant?
'O what a beautiful morning',
'there's a bright golden haze on the meadow',
my father, in his thirties singing,
downstairs in the kitchen
as he prepared to go to his chemist shop,
his prairie.

I am older now than he was then.
My prairie, a pastoral pasture,
for rounding up without corall.
A branding at baptism, the lasoo
of need.
Though he now in Elysian fields of corn,
somewhere at the meadow of the River Styx.
the songs continues on,
' o what a beautiful morning'.
Memory waits to uncoil,
like cut grass gathered for the meal.
'The farmer and the cowman must be friends'.