Farmer's Dream

To sit at the edge of a field, to have laid it open
to the snow, to the wind, to fire;

to have dug out stumps
and set grassy shadows to growing
where tall shadows grew;

to have watered and weeded
and driven off greedy flocks;
to have shot beasts
intent on burying beneath it;

and to have called birds
and set them as sentinels above it;

to have built a fence
and taken the harvest carefully,
stitching up the wound:

to accept that in one field
I cannot love all fields
well.