The Furrows of Life
The weary ploughman shuffles
along the deserted bridle path,
his day-long work completed,
furrows wound around his piece of land,
just arable enough to provide his daily bread.
His dreary shack is cold and bare,
just a few essentials. Oh, once it thrived,
but that, alas, was quite a long past.
Slow movements help him light his fire,
and hang inside the hearth a pot full
of vegetables harvested from small plots
that once was a sort of garden of his wife.
Waiting for his meagre repast, he sits.
upon a decrepit sofa, thinking of the furrows
and what he could sow there provided
he manages to find the seeds and tubers
for the next Thanksgiving Day.
Furrows, furrows everywhere, so very like
the furrows of his weary days gone by.
The day when he was barely ten years old,
came home to find his drunkard of a father
dead at last from cirrhosis of the liver.
Left school and began to till the land
under the caring eyes of his once-battered mother.
The day he met plain Jane, shy and speechless,
they walked along the banks of a lonely stream,
never uttering a word, never holding hands
until the day they finally got married.
Then, the worst furrow of all, the day his child
Was born prematurely stillborn. That day
he could not mourn. Only his wife cried.
Until some years later she too followed her child.
And still, he would not mourn, bottled-up grief.
Yet he had one firm conviction.
The paths of life lead slowly to the last furrow,
there to find, at last, eternal peace.
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