There will come an hour

In an afternoon of reckoning

To shuffle down the hallway,

Turning in at the door—

The room is old and faintly terrifying:

You did not know them then.

At twenty they welcomed the sun for breakfast

And evenings sipped coffee—without fear—

As long black shadows fell across the fields,

Fell across the lawn and into the far corner

Where the beautiful baby slept.

There were flowers in the windows

And the yellow corn grew tall;

Easy minds explored the hours

Spent talking in this hall.

A woman was marked within her child

And a man with his sky-proud stalks

And time was marked within the sense

Of seasons and sunrises.

You did not know them that long December

When they rocked by the fire.

The farmer gave up his eyes to the flames

And the woman abandoned her eyes to the black woods

That held her first-born in the ground.

The world was past them then.

Come the New Year they would sift their minds

And find the ways to pass the time;

Come the spring the corn would assault the sky

And be pulled from its height by aimless hands

To be sold to the unfamiliar man in town;

Come the spring the wife would do the canning,

Thinking they must eat well the next winter.

You did not know them that long December

When they rocked by the fire.

In August the money from the yellow pride

Bought a box

And all the blood-kin came

To lay the woman in the woods

By a mound that grows grass quite well.

September was good for fishing

And the farmer passed the time

Until the air and leaves and sky

Heaved in that last great beauty of summer

And the man came in—

Came in to this quiet room

And stood in the afternoon grey.

Something old in the farmer’s blood—

A mind within a mind that could read the wind—

Shivered in this quiet room.

The world was past him then

And the sense lost in summers and graves

And the emptiness shook him like dying in a dream,

A dream that promised to be there

In shadows and sunshine

A vision on a wind

Stirring an afternoon of reckoning.

There will come an hour

In an afternoon of reckoning

And you will know the things that went before.

You will be here in the afternoon grey,

A mind within a mind that comes to read the wind.