Stacking The Straw poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry

In those days the oatfields’

fenced-in vats of running platinum,

the yellower alloy of wheat and barley,

whose end, however gorgeous all that trammeled

rippling in the wind, came down

to toaster-fodder, cereal

as a commodity, were a rebuke

to permanence-to bronze or any metal

less utilitarian than the barbed braids

that marked off a farmer’s property,

or the stoked dinosaur of a steam engine

that made its rounds from farm to farm,

after the grain was cut and bundled,

and powered the machine that did the threshing.

Strawstacks’ beveled loaves, a shape

that’s now extinct, in those days were

the nearest thing the region had

to monumental sculpture. While hayracks

and wagons came and went, delivering bundles,

carting the winnowed ore off to the granary,

a lone man with a pitchfork stood aloft

beside the hot mouth of the blower,

building about himself, forkful

by delicately maneuvered forkful,

a kind of mountain, the golden

stuff of mulch, bedding for animals.

I always thought of him with awe-

a craftsman whose evolving altitude

gave him the aura of a hero. He’d come down

from the summit of the season’s effort

black with the baser residues of that

discarded gold. Saint Thomas of Aquino

also came down from the summit

of a lifetime’s effort, and declared

that everything he’d ever done was straw.