FARM CYCLE

THE EDUCATION OF A CITY GIRL

Last night,

children played on

hot sidewalks under the white glow of

lamp- lined streets and

the skyline was brighter than

the moon while

the hum of traffic pointed everything to

buildings full of fluorescent light.

Tonight,

lambs linger along

creek banks under the waxing

moon and

the sky is darker than the bottom

of the pond while

the hum of front-porch talk

pauses to consider a lawn

full of flickering fireflies.

SUMMER’S END

Hay, in brown swaths

outlines the meadows

as we

mow and ted and rake and bale.

Swallows dip and dive

snatching lunch as it

rises from a dusty field.

THE BREEDING SEASON

The ram is on duty.

He follows each ewe

stretching his lips into a tight smile

to taste her ripeness

HEAT
Mornings are dew dazzled

and in the woods, we crunch

through carpets of leaves.

You say, “Firewood heats you three times.

Once in the cutting,

once in the unloading

and once in the stove.”

Branches scrape and creak

against the sky while one weathered tree

stands limbless and quiet.

You make the first cut and the wailing saw

spits chips.

Then I hear the soft crack

of splinters parting

and the tree comes crashing

down.

MIDNIGHT IN THE BARN

Steam rises.

Animals exhale-

a quiet breathing.

Sheep bleat,

cows moan, and

hay shuffles

as kine and swine

turn

shift

stretch

and recline

 in

summer’s leftover

pleasure

LAMB LaMAZE

A ewe pants and pushes

pants and

pushes

straightens legs

arches neck

push  push

bleat

one small foot

slips out

then slides back

inside

push

push

two feet and

the tip of a white nose

play hide and

seek

push

push

pause

suddenly

shoulders,

a long body,

back legs

at last a

lamb drops to the hay

and mama turns to lick it to

life.

MIDWIFE

She cannot have her lamb.

it is stuck

somewhere between

cervix and vulva,

a tunnel too narrow

for a lamb with one leg

curled back.

I reach in

and my cold hand is suddenly warm.

I hook the front leg with one finger

behind the knee

and pull,

and like a tender sprout uncurling to the sun

the leg straightens

and the lamb is free

to slide onto the hay.

TOO MANY

The old ewe,

is thin under

her wool.

Twenty-five lambs in

twelve years

pulling rich milk from

her swollen teats

have stolen her roundness.

Now, three more

steam on the

frozen ground

where she has dropped them.

The ewe knickers, and nibbles until

they rise, on wobbly legs.

Three lambs search for milk

but the ewe rejects one

pushing it away

each time it approaches

until it gives up

and drops to the ground

exhausted.

Then she turns and takes her twins

to the barn.

BOTTLE LAMBS

These lambs, pushed away by overwhelmed ewes,

or abandoned by ignorant ones,

are always hungry.

They want

to nuzzle skin

while they drink.

They want noses tucked into warm wool

while they tug and pull.

They want ewe bleats, snorts, and stomach rumbles

as they suck.

Instead they get

a green bottle

full of fake milk

to suck from a bright red

rubber nipple.

TIRED

There are six lambs in the barn

six lambs without mamas

six lambs that jump up expectantly

each time I enter.

And I am tired of mixing milk.

And I am tired of sticky hands and

the sour smell of my coat

where the lambs have sucked it.

And I am tired of pulling boots on and off.

But mostly I am tired of feeling sad about

lambs that lost their mamas

Tell me again why I love to live on a farm.

ALMOST GONE

When I find the lamb out in the field

it is almost gone.

I stick one finger in its mouth.

Ice cold is not a good sign.

I cannot leave it here,

so I wrap it in a feedsack.

This little girl lamb,

with spotted ears,

doesn’t open her eyes,

doesn’t bleat,

doesn’t kick,

is as lifeless as a loaf of bread

as I carry her to the house

where I fill a sink with warm water

and baptize her until

she struggles and her mouth

is warm.

Too weak to suck a bottle, she will have to be tube fed.

I have three choices.

 I will tube her wrong and she will die. 

I won’t tube her and she will die.

I will tube her correctly and she will live.

I feed the tube down her throat,

maybe it’s in her lungs

maybe it’s in her stomach.

Every trick I know for doing it right works,

sometimes.

Then I pour warm milk into the syringe

and pray.

She doesn’t die.

Life comes in slowly.

A moan,

a lifting of her head,

a shake of her ears.

Two hours later

I tube her again.

Then go to bed.

Morning will tell.

As the first light

brightens the sky

I hear her bleat

and go downstairs.

She is standing on shaky legs

and pissing all over my floor.

And I laugh.

MAKING LOVE IN THE FRONT SEAT OF THE CHEVY

The sun licks the last

drops of frost

from the front windshield

as I bend

over

to retrieve a loose bolt

from the floorboard and

find myself caught

by the strong arm

of the gearshift.

I twist around

legs flung wide

like a bawdy girl,

and we

laugh ourselves breathless

as you

rescue

me from

the truck’s

steely embrace

SPRING

After a winter of snow

and cold,

after digging endless pathways,

after thousands of bottles of milk

after ashes inside and cats inside and mud inside,

there is some green

outside

and the peepers are singing songs

about spring.

KING OF THE HILL

The lambs

leap and kick

they buck and duck,

Who is strongest?

Who is fastest?

Who can leap the highest?

One lamb stands alone

hunched against the small breeze.

Abandoned at birth, it is always hungry

for milk and attention.

COYOTE

The lambs play

unaware

while their wooly mamas

crop grass

      three quick steps

a snatch,

a muffled bleat,

and a lamb

leaves the flock

throat-first

while its mama

wanders away

in search of

a

blade

of

grass.

LAMB CROP

The sun is shining

on fields full of lambs

and the lamb check this year will be good

if the lambs survive

the coyotes

the bears

the dogs

and the worms .

The sun is shining on fields full of lambs

and the lamb check this year will be good

unless

the lambs survive

all of that

and die anyway.

Anyone who raises sheep knows

a lamb is born looking

for a way to die.

NOTHING TO DO

We sit on the tailgate

in the sun.

There is nothing to do today.

No lambs to feed.

No hay to scatter.

No buckets to fill and carry.

There is nothing to do today.

So we sit in the sun

and watch the lambs leap and the sheep eat

and the grass grow

which reminds us

there will be something to do

tomorrow.

IN THE STORE

Chops and roasts

rosy red in the case

don’t tell.

They don’t tell about

the night we spent lying in shit

as we pulled the lamb.

They don’t tell about the lamb that lived

one day and then died in my arms.

They don’t tell that lambs love to dance under a warm spring sun.

or about four lambs curled together against the cold.

Meat wrapped in cellophane

lies about the getting.

Leads to forgetting

that one life is always

the gift of

another life

followed by death,

followed by life.

On the farm

on our table

we remember and are humbled

by the truth.

A Lot of Lambs and a Hardworking Man

     The moon is full and so are the barns.  That extra bit of moon-inspired gravity is hastening the lambing.  Fourteen ewes have dropped thirty-two lambs to the straw in the last week.   The barnyard is full of leggy lambs and Joe’s days are full of work.  He starts each morning with a trip to the lambing barn. That’s where the pregnant ewes spend their nights.  If there are new lambs, then Joe cleans out a stall, adds fresh hay for bedding, carries the lambs in, chases the mama in and then feeds some hay and grain. Sometimes there’s only one ewe nosing a lamb or two around in the straw, but other mornings there might be three ewes and six lambs all jumbled together.  They must be sorted out, but Joe has some tricks up his sleeve.  He pulls the similar looking lambs into separate areas of the barn.  The moms can identify their lambs by smell and sound, so they run around, sniffing and bleating until they’ve claimed their babies.  When all of the new families have been moved into stalls, the rest of the ewes are shooed out to the meadow where they are fed three gallons of grain and two bales of hay.  

      After his stint in the maternity ward, Joe visits the nursery.  Each stall in the bottom of our barn is divided in half to accommodate two sets of ewes and lambs.  He visits each stall, checking on the lambs and gathering up the black rubber water buckets.  After several trips to the water hydrant, all the mamas have fresh water.  Then Joe scoops up five gallons of grain and gives each ewe her breakfast.  If the lambs are new, he dips their umbilical cords in iodine to prevent bacterial infections.  If they are at least a day old and looking healthy, he bands their tails and testicles.  If they’ve been banded for at least a day, then each lamb is painted with a number to match mama’s ear tag. This makes it easier to sort them out later. 

       From the barn, Joe carries two five gallon buckets of grain out to the orchard lot.  That’s where the older lambs and ewes stay until they are turned out to pasture.  He dumps his buckets into the five sided feeders.  Then he fills a trough with water.  After that, Joe climbs into the hay mow and throws down six bales of hay.  When the ewes finish the last of the grain, they get two of the fifty pound bales.  If Joe is lucky, then that’s it for the sheep until suppertime, but more often than not, there’s a ewe in a stall who won’t nurse a lamb, so she must be tied and the lamb held in place to nurse.  Or there is a triplet whose mama didn’t have enough milk.  So Joe goes up to the house, mixes a bottle of milk replacer and then carries it back down to the barn for the hungry baby.

    All of these things happen before Joe goes off to the shop for the day.  They are repeated in the evening, after work, along with feeding all of the cows.  No wonder my husband spends most of his evening after supper napping in his chair.

Date Night

     The barn was quiet tonight when we pulled up to check on the sheep. The first group of forty ewes is just about finished lambing, but Joe wanted to make sure there would be no lamb surprises in the morning. This has been an interesting lambing season. One ewe dropped her lambs out in the pasture bottom in the snow and they died before we discovered them. She wasn’t supposed to lamb for another month, but apparently the buck jumped the fence. Two other ewes have lambed out there, but Joe found them in time to bring them back to the barn where they enjoyed a snug stall until the lambs were ready to be turned out.

     Another ewe gave birth to quadruplets. Four strapping lambs that made us wonder how in the world they all fit inside. She dropped the lambs out in the small meadow where the imminently expectant ewes spend their days. The quadruplets are several days old now and so far we haven’t had to supplement their mama’s milk with a bottle. As big as a child’s-size basketball, her udder is well…udderly fantastic. The lambs take turns ducking under and butting at it before they latch on and suck. It seems she never gets a moment without at least one lamb bumping her and grabbing on, but she bleats contentedly in her stall, and the lambs are full of pep. I’m certainly glad my boys didn’t have to butt at me that way. Sometimes, after the lambs are about a month old, you can see them out in the meadow hitting mama’s udder so hard that they lift her back end off the ground several inches. Ouch!

     Joe has spent almost every afternoon in the old barn, numbering and docking lambs. The mothers wear numbered plastic tags in their left ears and their babies get the same number painted on their rear ends. Tonight I am along to help. Joe catches the lambs and hands them to me where they dangle from my arms with their bellies facing him. If the lamb is a boy he gets a band on his testicles and one on his tail. If it’s a girl, just her tail is docked. After the banding, I flip the lambs around and Joe dips the metal branding irons into the red paint and presses them onto the lamb’s left hip. Then they are placed gently back into the pen with mama who has been nickering softly in concern. The banding hurts the babies for a little while, so they usually lie down in the hay until the pain subsides, but in an hour or two, they will be up and butting at mama for more milk. Banding prevents poop from accumulating in their tails. I’ve seen undocked sheep in the summer, their long tails covered with brown feces. This creates a breeding ground for maggots, so it’s healthier for the sheep to be tail-less. And of course the little boys can’t have all their parts because they can begin to breed at a fairly young age. This would lead to continuous in-breeding and weaker stock.

     When we finish, I stand for a minute in the feedway, just admiring all the history in the hand-planed, wood pegged beams that hold up the massive walls. This barn is almost a hundred years old, and looks ready for another hundred years. Then we turn off the lights and climb back into the warm car. It’s been another wonderful date night on the farm.

Midnight in the Barn

steam rises
animals exhale
a quiet breathing
sheep bleat
cows moan and
hay shuffles
as kine and swine
turn
shift
stretch
and recline
in
summer’s leftover
pleasures