Skagit Valley Agricultural Mural, 1941
William Cumming Museum of Northwest Art
La Conner, Washington
You who have wielded the maul these eighty-odd years,
your work boots leaden below bent knees
you may set it down.
And you heaving the milk can—your bowed back must ache.
Set it down.
The stooped farmer may rise and the milker
may return the cows to pasture.
You who worked through so many Sabbaths,
through wartime and the stormy peace that followed
it’s time to rest.
Your grandchildren now plant
gardens of yarrow and milkweed,
nostalgic for the cows they never milked,
for sparrow song and dung-scented earth,
alarmed by sudden fires and fearsome storms
you never dreamed they’d face.
Lost Art of Mending
–after Eavan Boland
Beside her newspapers and brandy,
my mother sits under the lamplight
hemming a skirt or letting it down,
sewing a button on my father’s shirt,
darning the ladders that open on her
heavy stockings. Later we would thread
her needle, a diver into the river
of fabric on her lap. Her granny must
have taught her to sew, the art perfected
those lean years of her teens, frugality
stitched in for life.
It’s not completely lost:
I taught myself to darn, making a small
nest of crisscrossing thread, saving
a favorite pair of socks from the dead.
Suzy Harris was born and raised in Indiana and has lived her adult life in Portland, Oregon. In 2023, she published a chapbook called Listening in the Dark (The Poetry Box) about her journey through hearing loss and learning to hear again with cochlear implants.
