1739: Breakings | Henry Taylor
"Breakings"
Henry Taylor
Long before I first left home, my father
tried to teach me horses, land, and sky,
to show me how his kind of work was done.
I studied how to be my father’s son,
but all I learned was, when the wicked die,
they ride combines through barley forever.
Every summer I hated my father
as I drove hot horses through the dusty grass;
and so I broke with him, and left the farm
for other work, where unfamiliar weather
broke on my head an unexpected storm
and things I had not studied came to pass.
So nothing changes, nothing stays the same,
and I have returned from a broken home
alone, to ask for a job breaking horses.
I watch a colt on a long line making
tracks in dust, and think of the kinds of breakings
there are, and the kinds of restraining forces.
You say to me stay awake, be like the lensmaker who died with his/lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be/their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.
Henry Taylor
Long before I first left home, my father
tried to teach me horses, land, and sky,
to show me how his kind of work was done.
I studied how to be my father’s son,
but all I learned was, when the wicked die,
they ride combines through barley forever.
Every summer I hated my father
as I drove hot horses through the dusty grass;
and so I broke with him, and left the farm
for other work, where unfamiliar weather
broke on my head an unexpected storm
and things I had not studied came to pass.
So nothing changes, nothing stays the same,
and I have returned from a broken home
alone, to ask for a job breaking horses.
I watch a colt on a long line making
tracks in dust, and think of the kinds of breakings
there are, and the kinds of restraining forces.
You say to me stay awake, be like the lensmaker who died with his/lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be/their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.