It’s a Long Way To Go To Paint a Chicken (A Pastoral Poem)

by Bruce Whiteman

The barometer recalculates and now
dark winter’s back, the equinox three weeks since.
The ewes are still not up to giving birth.
The farmyard cat seeks warmth and rarely walks abroad.

Lettuce grows under heat lamps far from sight.
A small brown calf, conceived out of season
by a frisky bull who ran amuck and had his luck
with Elsie, struggles to stand amid the frozen mud.

The pigs take shelter underneath the hay.
Their bliss is unmistakable. The grave and
elephantine sow is unmoving, lying on her
side and crumpled like a castoff winter coat,

yet seemingly glad for life and farrow.
No human eye however tired or
wretched in the endless cold can fail
to see that life goes on despite our

private gloom, and poetry can help deploy
whatever of it’s needed to stay alive.
It restitutes incomparable companions,
a chicken or the longing, devoted heart.