Best Famous Tractor Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Tractor poems. This is a select list of the best famous Tractor poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Tractor poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of tractor poems.

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• All Famous Tractor Poems

Written by Edgar Bowers | Elegy: Walking the Line Every month or so, Sundays, we walked the line, The limit and the boundary. Past the sweet gum Superb above the cabin, along the wall— Stones gathered from the level field nearby When first we cleared it. (Angry bumblebees Stung the two mules. They kicked. Thirteen, I ran. ) And then the field: thread-leaf maple, deciduous Magnolia, hybrid broom, and, further down, In light shade, one Franklinia Alatamaha In solstice bloom, all white, most graciously. On the sunnier slope, the wild plums that my mother Later would make preserves of, to give to friends Or sell, in autumn, with the foxgrape, quince, Elderberry, and muscadine. Around The granite overhang, moist den of foxes; Gradually up a long hill, high in pine, Park-like, years of dry needles on the ground, And dogwood, slopes the settlers terraced; pine We cut at Christmas, berries, hollies, anise, And cones for sale in Mister Haymore’s yard In town, below the Courthouse Square. James Haymore, One of the two good teachers at Boys’ High, Ironic and demanding, chemistry; Mary Lou Culver taught us English: essays, Plot summaries, outlines, meters, kinds of clauses (Noun, adjective, and adverb, five at a time), Written each day and then revised, and she Up half the night to read them once again Through her pince-nez, under a single lamp. Across the road, on a steeper hill, the settlers Set a house, unpainted, the porch fallen in, The road a red clay strip without a bridge, A shallow stream that liked to overflow. Oliver Brand’s mules pulled our station wagon Out of the gluey mire, earth’s rust. Then, here And there, back from the road, the specimen Shrubs and small trees my father planted, some Taller than we were, some in bloom, some berried, And some we still brought water to. We always Paused at the weed-filled hole beside the beech That, one year, brought forth beech nuts by the thousands, A hole still reminiscent of the man Chewing tobacco in among his whiskers My father happened on, who, discovered, told Of dreaming he should dig there for the gold And promised to give half of what he found. During the wars with Germany and Japan, Descendents of the settlers, of Oliver Brand And of that man built Flying Fortresses For Lockheed, in Atlanta; now they build Brick mansions in the woods they left, with lawns To paved and lighted streets, azaleas, camellias Blooming among the pines and tulip trees— Mercedes Benz and Cadillac Republicans. There was another stream further along Divided through a marsh, lined by the fence We stretched to posts with Mister Garner’s help The time he needed cash for his son’s bail And offered all his place. A noble spring Under the oak root cooled his milk and butter. He called me “honey,” working with us there (My father bought three acres as a gift), His wife pale, hair a country orange, voice Uncanny, like a ghost’s, through the open door Behind her, chickens scratching on the floor. Barred Rocks, our chickens; one, a rooster, splendid Sliver and grey, red comb and long sharp spurs, Once chased Aunt Jennie as far as the daphne bed The two big king snakes were familiars of. My father’s dog would challenge him sometimes To laughter and applause. Once, in Stone Mountain, Travelers, stopped for gas, drove off with Smokey; Angrily, grievingly, leaving his work, my father Traced the car and found them way far south, Had them arrested and, bringing Smokey home, Was proud as Sherlock Holmes, and happier. Above the spring, my sister’s cats, black Amy, Grey Junior, down to meet us. The rose trees, Domestic, Asiatic, my father’s favorites. The bridge, marauding dragonflies, the bullfrog, Camellias cracked and blackened by the freeze, Bay tree, mimosa, mountain laurel, apple, Monkey pine twenty feet high, banana shrub, The owls’ tall pine curved like a flattened S. The pump house Mort and I built block by block, Smooth concrete floor, roof pale aluminum Half-covered by a clematis, the pump Thirty feet down the mountain’s granite foot. Mort was the hired man sent to us by Fortune, Childlike enough to lead us. He brought home, Although he could not even drive a tractor, Cheated, a worthless car, which we returned. When, at the trial to garnishee his wages, Frank Guess, the judge, Grandmother’s longtime neighbor, Whose children my mother taught in Cradle Roll, Heard Mort’s examination, he broke in As if in disbelief on the bank’s attorneys: “Gentlemen, must we continue this charade?” Finally, past the compost heap, the garden, Tomatoes and sweet corn for succotash, Okra for frying, Kentucky Wonders, limas, Cucumbers, squashes, leeks heaped round with soil, Lavender, dill, parsley, and rosemary, Tithonia and zinnias between the rows; The greenhouse by the rock wall, used for cuttings In late spring, frames to grow them strong for planting Through winter into summer. Early one morning Mort called out, lying helpless by the bridge. His ashes we let drift where the magnolia We planted as a stem divides the path The others lie, too young, at Silver Hill, Except my mother. Ninety-five, she lives Three thousand miles away, beside the bare Pacific, in rooms that overlook the Mission, The Riviera, and the silver range La Cumbre east. Magnolia grandiflora And one druidic live oak guard the view. Proudly around the walls, she shows her paintings Of twenty years ago: the great oak’s arm Extended, Zeuslike, straight and strong, wisteria Tangled among the branches, amaryllis Around the base; her cat, UC, at ease In marigolds; the weeping cherry, pink And white arms like a blessing to the blue Bird feeder Mort made; cabin, scarlet sweet gum Superb when tribes migrated north and south. Alert, still quick of speech, a little blind, Active, ready for laughter, open to fear, Pity, and wonder that such things may be, Some Sundays, I think, she must walk the line, Aunt Jennie, too, if she were still alive, And Eleanor, whose story is untold, Their presences like muses, prompting me In my small study, all listening to the sea, All of one mind, the true posterity.

Written by Tony Hoagland | Why the Young Men Are So Ugly They have little tractors in their blood and all day the tractors climb up and down inside their arms and legs, their collarbones and heads. That is why they yell and scream and slam the barbells down into their clanking slots, making the metal ring like sledgehammers on iron, like dungeon prisoners rattling their chains. That is why they shriek their tires at the stopsign, why they turn the base up on the stereo until it shakes the traffic light, until it dryhumps the eardrum of the crossing guard. Testosterone is a drug, and they say No, No, No until they are overwhelmed and punch their buddy in the face for joy, or make a joke about gravy and bottomless holes to a middle-aged waitress who is gently setting down the plate in front of them. If they are grotesque, if what they say and do is often nothing more than a kind of psychopathic fart, it is only because of the tractors, the tractors in their blood, revving their engines, chewing up the turf inside their arteries and veins It is the testosterone tractor constantly climbing the mudhill of the world and dragging the young man behind it by a chain around his leg. In the stink and the noise, in the clouds of filthy exhaust is where they live. It is the tractors that make them what they are. While they make being a man look like a disease.

Written by Howard Nemerov | Learning by Doing They're taking down a tree at the front door, The power saw is snarling at some nerves, Whining at others. Now and then it grunts, And sawdust falls like snow or a drift of seeds. Rotten, they tell us, at the fork, and one Big wind would bring it down. So what they do They do, as usual, to do us good. Whatever cannot carry its own weight Has got to go, and so on; you expect To hear them talking next about survival And the values of a free society. For in the explanations people give On these occasions there is generally some Mean-spirited moral point, and everyone Privately wonders if his neighbors plan To saw him up before he falls on them. Maybe a hundred years in sun and shower Dismantled in a morning and let down Out of itself a finger at a time And then an arm, and so down to the trunk, Until there's nothing left to hold on to Or snub the splintery holding rope around, And where those big green divagations were So loftily with shadows interleaved The absent-minded blue rains in on us. Now that they've got it sectioned on the ground It looks as though somebody made a plain Error in diagnosis, for the wood Looks sweet and sound throughout. You couldn't know, Of course, until you took it down. That's what Experts are for, and these experts stand round The giant pieces of tree as though expecting An instruction booklet from the factory Before they try to put it back together. Anyhow, there it isn't, on the ground. Next come the tractor and the crowbar crew To extirpate what's left and fill the grave. Maybe tomorrow grass seed will be sown. There's some mean-spirited moral point in that As well: you learn to bury your mistakes, Though for a while at dusk the darkening air Will be with many shadows interleaved, And pierced with a bewilderment of birds.

Written by R S Thomas | On The Farm There was Dai Puw. He was no good. They put him in the fields to dock swedes, And took the knife from him, when he came home At late evening with a grin Like the slash of a knife on his face. There was Llew Puw, and he was no good. Every evening after the ploughing With the big tractor he would sit in his chair, And stare into the tangled fire garden, Opening his slow lips like a snail. There was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say? I have heard him whistling in the hedges On and on, as though winter Would never again leave those fields, And all the trees were deformed. And lastly there was the girl: Beauty under some spell of the beast. Her pale face was the lantern By which they read in life's dark book The shrill sentence: God is love.

Written by R S Thomas | Welsh Landscape To live in Wales is to be conscious At dusk of the spilled blood That went into the making of the wild sky, Dyeing the immaculate rivers In all their courses. It is to be aware, Above the noisy tractor And hum of the machine Of strife in the strung woods, Vibrant with sped arrows. You cannot live in the present, At least not in Wales. There is the language for instance, The soft consonants Strange to the ear. There are cries in the dark at night As owls answer the moon, And thick ambush of shadows, Hushed at the fields' corners. There is no present in Wales, And no future; There is only the past, Brittle with relics, Wind-bitten towers and castles With sham ghosts; Mouldering quarries and mines; And an impotent people, Sick with inbreeding, Worrying the carcase of an old song. To live in Wales is to be conscious At dusk of the spilled blood That went into the making of the wild sky, Dyeing the immaculate rivers In all their courses. It is to be aware, Above the noisy tractor And hum of the machine Of strife in the strung woods, Vibrant with sped arrows. You cannot live in the present, At least not in Wales. There is the language for instance, The soft consonants Strange to the ear. There are cries in the dark at night As owls answer the moon, And thick ambush of shadows, Hushed at the fields' corners. There is no present in Wales, And no future; There is only the past, Brittle with relics, Wind-bitten towers and castles With sham ghosts; Mouldering quarries and mines; And an impotent people, Sick with inbreeding, Worrying the carcase of an old song.

Written by Marianne Moore | The Pangolin Another armored animal--scale lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they form the uninterrupted central tail-row! This near artichoke with head and legs and grit-equipped gizzard, the night miniature artist engineer is, yes, Leonardo da Vinci's replica-- impressive animal and toiler of whom we seldom hear. Armor seems extra. But for him, the closing ear-ridge-- or bare ear lacking even this small eminence and similarly safe contracting nose and eye apertures impenetrably closable, are not; a true ant-eater, not cockroach eater, who endures exhausting solitary trips through unfamiliar ground at night, returning before sunrise, stepping in the moonlight, on the moonlight peculiarly, that the outside edges of his hands may bear the weight and save the claws for digging. Serpentined about the tree, he draws away from danger unpugnaciously, with no sound but a harmless hiss; keeping the fragile grace of the Thomas- of-Leighton Buzzard Westminster Abbey wrought-iron vine, or rolls himself into a ball that has power to defy all effort to unroll it; strongly intailed, neat head for core, on neck not breaking off, with curled-in-feet. Nevertheless he has sting-proof scales; and nest of rocks closed with earth from inside, which can thus darken. Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast each with a splendor which man in all his vileness cannot set aside; each with an excellence! "Fearfull yet to be feared," the armored ant-eater met by the driver-ant does not turn back, but engulfs what he can, the flattened sword- edged leafpoints on the tail and artichoke set leg- and body-plates quivering violently when it retaliates and swarms on him. Compact like the furled fringed frill on the hat-brim of Gargallo's hollow iron head of a matador, he will drop and will then walk away unhurt, although if unintruded on, he cautiously works down the tree, helped by his tail. The giant-pangolin- tail, graceful tool, as a prop or hand or broom or ax, tipped like an elephant's trunkwith special skin, is not lost on this ant- and stone-swallowing uninjurable artichoke which simpletons thought a living fable whom the stones had nourished, whereas ants had done so. Pangolins are not aggressive animals; between dusk and day they have not unchain-like machine-like form and frictionless creep of a thing made graceful by adversities, con- versities. To explain grace requires a curious hand. If that which is at all were not forever, why would those who graced the spires with animals and gathered there to rest, on cold luxurious low stone seats--a monk and monk and monk--between the thus ingenious roof supports, have slaved to confuse grace with a kindly manner, time in which to pay a debt, the cure for sins, a graceful use of what are yet approved stone mullions branching out across the perpendiculars? A sailboat was the first machine. Pangolins, made for moving quietly also, are models of exactness, on four legs; on hind feet plantigrade, with certain postures of a man. Beneath sun and moon, man slaving to make his life more sweet, leaves half the flowers worth having, needing to choose wisely how to use his strength; a paper-maker like the wasp; a tractor of foodstuffs, like the ant; spidering a length of web from bluffs above a stream; in fighting, mechanicked like the pangolin; capsizing in disheartenment. Bedizened or stark naked, man, the self, the being we call human, writing- masters to this world, griffons a dark "Like does not like like that is abnoxious"; and writes error with four r's. Among animals, one has sense of humor. Humor saves a few steps, it saves years. Unignorant, modest and unemotional, and all emotion, he has everlasting vigor, power to grow, though there are few creatures who can make one breathe faster and make one erecter. Not afraid of anything is he, and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an obstacle at every step. Consistent with the formula--warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few hairs-- that is a mammal; there he sits on his own habitat, serge-clad, strong-shod. The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done, says to the alternating blaze, "Again the sun! anew each day; and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul. "

Written by Ted Hughes | Tractor The tractor stands frozen - an agony To think of. All night Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale, A spill of molten ice, smoking snow, Pours into its steel. At white heat of numbness it stands In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness. It defied flesh and won't start. Hands are like wounds already Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable As if the toe-nails were all just torn off. I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it The copse hisses - capitulates miserably In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings, A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly, over Towards plantations Eastward. All the time the tractor is sinking Through the degrees, deepening Into its hell of ice. The starting lever Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle. The battery is alive - but like a lamb Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother - While the seat claims my buttock-bones, bites With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined In one solid lump. I squirt commercial sure-fire Down the black throat - it just coughs. It ridicules me - a trap of iron stupidity I've stepped into. I drive the battery As if I were hammering and hammering The frozen arrangement to pieces with a hammer And it jabbers laughing pain-crying mockingly Into happy life. And stands Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge slowly Like a demon demonstrating A more-than-usually-complete materialization - Suddenly it jerks from its solidarity With the concrete, and lurches towards a stanchion Bursting with superhuman well-being and abandon Shouting Where Where? Worse iron is waiting. Power-lift kneels Levers awake imprisoned deadweight, Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-****. The blind and vibrating condemned obedience Of iron to the cruelty of iron, Wheels screeched out of their night-locks - Fingers Among the tormented Tonnage and burning of iron Eyes Weeping in the wind of chloroform And the tractor, streaming with sweat, Raging and trembling and rejoicing.

Written by Seamus Heaney | Keeping Going The piper coming from far away is you With a whitewash brush for a sporran Wobbling round you, a kitchen chair Upside down on your shoulder, your right arm Pretending to tuck the bag beneath your elbow, Your pop-eyes and big cheeks nearly bursting With laughter, but keeping the drone going on Interminably, between catches of breath. * The whitewash brush. An old blanched skirted thing On the back of the byre door, biding its time Until spring airs spelled lime in a work-bucket And a potstick to mix it in with water. Those smells brought tears to the eyes, we inhaled A kind of greeny burning and thought of brimstone. But the slop of the actual job Of brushing walls, the watery grey Being lashed on in broad swatches, then drying out Whiter and whiter, all that worked like magic. Where had we come from, what was this kingdom We knew we'd been restored to? Our shadows Moved on the wall and a tar border glittered The full length of the house, a black divide Like a freshly opened, pungent, reeking trench. * Piss at the gable, the dead will congregate. But separately. The women after dark, Hunkering there a moment before bedtime, The only time the soul was let alone, The only time that face and body calmed In the eye of heaven. Buttermilk and urine, The pantry, the housed beasts, the listening bedroom. We were all together there in a foretime, In a knowledge that might not translate beyond Those wind-heaved midnights we still cannot be sure Happened or not. It smelled of hill-fort clay And cattle dung. When the thorn tree was cut down You broke your arm. I shared the dread When a strange bird perched for days on the byre roof. * That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate In his nightmare--when he meets the hags agains And sees the apparitions in the pot-- I felt at home with that one all right. Hearth, Steam and ululation, the smoky hair Curtaining a cheek. 'Don't go near bad boys In that college that you're bound for. Do you hear me? Do you hear me speaking to you? Don't forget!' And then the postick quickening the gruel, The steam crown swirled, everything intimate And fear-swathed brightening for a moment, Then going dull and fatal and away. * Grey matter like gruel flecked with blood In spatters on the whitewash. A clean spot Where his head had been, other stains subsumed In the parched wall he leant his back against That morning like any other morning, Part-time reservist, toting his lunch-box. A car came slow down Castle Street, made the halt, Crossed the Diamond, slowed again and stopped Level with him, although it was not his lift. And then he saw an ordinary face For what it was and a gun in his own face. His right leg was hooked back, his sole and heel Against the wall, his right knee propped up steady, So he never moved, just pushed with all his might Against himself, then fell past the tarred strip, Feeding the gutter with his copious blood. * My dear brother, you have good stamina. You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people, You shout and laugh about the revs, you keep old roads open by driving on the new ones. You called the piper's sporrans whitewash brushes And then dressed up and marched us through the kitchen, But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong. I see you at the end of your tether sometimes, In the milking parlour, holding yourself up Between two cows until your turn goes past, Then coming to in the smell of dung again And wondering, is this all? As it was In the beginning, is now and shall be? Then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush Up on the byre door, and keeping going.

Written by Carl Sandburg | New Farm Tractor The rear axles hold the kick of twenty Missouri jackasses. It is in the records of the patent office and the ads there is twenty horse power pull here. The farm boy says hello to you instead of twenty mules—he sings to you instead of ten span of mules. A bucket of oil and a can of grease is your hay and oats. Rain proof and fool proof they stable you anywhere in the fields with the stars for a roof. I carve a team of long ear mules on the steering wheel—it’s good-by now to leather reins and the songs of the old mule skinners.

Written by Philip Levine | The Present The day comes slowly in the railyard behind the ice factory. It broods on one cinder after another until each glows like lead or the eye of a dog possessed of no inner fire, the brown and greasy pointer who raises his muzzle a moment and sighing lets it thud down on the loading dock. In no time the day has crossed two sets of tracks, a semi-trailer with no tractor, and crawled down three stories of the bottling plant at the end of the alley. It is now less than five hours until mid-day when nothing will be left in doubt, each scrap of news, each banished carton, each forgotten letter, its ink bled of lies, will stare back at the one eye that sees it all and never blinks. But for now there is water settling in a clean glass on the shelf beside the razor, the slap of bare feet on the floor above. Soon the scent of rivers borne across roof after roof by winds without names, the aroma of opened beds better left closed, of mouths without teeth, of light rustling among the mice droppings at the back of a bin of potatoes. * The old man who sleeps among the cases of empty bottles in a little nest of rags and newspapers at the back of the plant is not an old man. He is twenty years younger than I am now putting this down in permanent ink on a yellow legal pad during a crisp morning in October. When he fell from a high pallet, his sleeve caught on a nail and spread his arms like a figure out of myth. His head tore open on a spear of wood, and he swore in French. No, he didn't want a doctor. He wanted toilet paper and a drink, which were fetched. He used the tiny bottle of whisky to straighten out his eyes and the toilet paper to clean his pants, fouled in the fall, and he did both with seven teenage boys looking on in wonder and fear. At last the blood slowed and caked above his ear, and he never once touched the wound. Instead, in a voice no one could hear, he spoke to himself, probably in French, and smoked sitting back against a pallet, his legs thrust out on the damp cement floor. * In his white coveralls, crisp and pressed, Teddy the Polack told us a fat tit would stop a toothache, two a headache. He told it to anyone who asked, and grinned -- the small eyes watering at the corners -- as Alcibiades might have grinned when at last he learned that love leads even the body beloved to a moment in the present when desire calms, the skin glows, the soul takes the light of day, even a working day in 1944. For Baharozian at seventeen the present was a gift. Seeing my ashen face, the cold sweats starting, he seated me in a corner of the boxcar and did both our jobs, stacking the full cases neatly row upon row and whistling the songs of Kate Smith. In the bathroom that night I posed naked before the mirror, the new cross of hair staining my chest, plunging to my groin. That was Wednesday, for every Wednesday ended in darkness. * One of those teenage boys was my brother. That night as we lay in bed, the lights out, we spoke of Froggy, of how at first we thought he would die and how little he seemed to care as the blood rose to fill and overflow his ear. Slowly the long day came over us and our breath quieted and eased at last, and we slept. When I close my eyes now his bare legs glow before me again, pure and lovely in their perfect whiteness, the buttocks dimpled and firm. I see again the rope of his sex, unwrinkled, flushed and swaying, the hard flat belly as he raises his shirt to clean himself. He gazes at no one or nothing, but seems instead to look off into a darkness I hadn't seen, a pool of shadow that forms before his eyes, in my memory now as solid as onyx. * I began this poem in the present because nothing is past. The ice factory, the bottling plant, the cindered yard all gave way to a low brick building a block wide and windowless where they designed gun mounts for personnel carriers that never made it to Korea. My brother rises early, and on clear days he walks to the corner to have toast and coffee. Seventeen winters have melted into an earth of stone, bottle caps, and old iron to carry off the hard remains of Froggy Frenchman without a blessing or a stone to bear it. A little spar of him the size of a finger, pointed and speckled as though blood-flaked, washed ashore from Lake Erie near Buffalo before the rest slipped down the falls out into the St. Lawrence. He could be at sea, he could be part of an ocean, by now he could even be home. This morning I rose later than usual in a great house full of sunlight, but I believe it came down step by step on each wet sheet of wooden siding before it crawled from the ceiling and touched my pillow to waken me. When I heave myself out of this chair with a great groan of age and stand shakily, the three mice still in the wall. From across the lots the wind brings voices I can't make out, scraps of song or sea sounds, daylight breaking into dust, the perfume of waiting rain, of onions and potatoes frying.