His fields are still, full of the sorrow of sparrows,
A few migratory birds winter in the windbreaks.
They know how snow will melt and move on.
The land is not warm enough yet for a population.

In a summer sun once, we broke up field clods.
My youth spoke silly—Dad, dirt clumps
are like clogged sentences. I only said it once,
later heard the hired hands in the haylofts

laughing. Dad had his own way about folks
and things. He respected every tool. Everything
inhabited its own place. God took care of fools.
His pencil stub calculated the very hour to plant.

Last October, Dad and I together sowed the green,
winter wheat. In what would be my eighty acres,
images became metaphors, twisted and twined.
His hands worried, imagined this land as mine.