The next one is called "Emergency Haying."
"Coming home with the last load I
ride standing on the wagon tongue
behind the tractor in hot exhaust,
lank with sweat, my arms strung awkwardly along the hay
rack, cruciform.
Almost 500 bales we've put up this afternoon, Marshall and I.
And of course I think of another who hung
like this on another cross.
My hands are torn by baling twine, not nails.
And my side is pierced by my ulcer, not a lance.
The acid in my throat is only hay-seed.
Yet exhaustion, and the way my body hangs
from twisted shoulders, suspended on two points of pain
in the rising monoxide recall that greater suffering.
Well, I changed grip and the image fades.
It's been an unlucky summer.
Heavy rains brought on the crop tremendously.
A monster crop, but wet, always wet.
Haying was long delayed.
Now is our last chance to bring in the winter's feed,
and Marshall needs help.
We mow, rake, bale and draw the bales to the barn, these late,
half green, improperly cured bales.
Some weigh 150 pounds or more, yet must
be lugged by the twine across the field, tossed on the load,
and then at the barn unloaded on the conveyor
and distributed in the loft.
I help.
I, the desk servant, word worker, and hold up my end
pretty well, too.
But God, at the close of day how I fall down then.
My hands are sore.
They flinch when I light my pipe.
I think of those who have done slave labor,
less able and less well prepared than I. Rose Marie in the rye
fields of Saxony, her father in the camps of Moldavia
and the Crimea.
All cooks and housekeepers herded
to the gaunt field of torture.
Hands too bloodied cannot bear even the touch of air,
even the touch of love.
I have a friend whose grandmother
cut cane with a machete, and cut and cut
until one day she snicked her hand off and took it
and threw it grandly at the sky.
Now in September, our New England mountains
under a clear sky for which we're thankful at last,
begin to glow, maples, beeches, birches, in their first color.
I look beyond our famous hay fields to our famous hills,
to the notch where the sunset is beginning.
Then in the other direction, eastward,
where a full new risen moon like a pale medallion
hangs in a lavender cloud beyond the barn.
My eyes sting with sweat and loveliness.
And who is the Christ now?
Who if not I?
It must be so.
My strength is legion, and I stand
up high on the wagon tongue in my whole bones
to say woe to you, watch out you sons
of bitches who would drive men and women to the fields
where they can only die."
[APPLAUSE]