Ruminant pillows! Gregarious soft boulders!<\/p>\n
If one of you found a gap in a stone wall,
\nthe rest of you\u2014rams, ewes, bucks, wethers, lambs;
\nmothers and daughters, old grandfather-father,
\ncousins and aunts, small bleating sons \u2014
\nfollowed onward, stupid
\nas sheep, wherever
\nyour leader\u2019s sheep-brain wandered to.<\/p>\n
My grandfather spent all day searching the valley
\nand edges of Ragged Mountain,
\ncalling \u201cKe-day!\u201d as if he brought you salt,
\n\u201cKe-day! Ke-day!\u201d<\/p>\n
* * *
\nWhen the shirt wore out, and darns in the woolen
\nshirt needed darning,
\na woman in a white collar
\ncut the shirt into strips and braided it,
\nas she braided her hair every morning.<\/p>\n
In a hundred years
\nthe knees of her great-granddaughter
\ncrawled on a rug made from the wool of sheep
\nwhose bones were mud,
\nlike the bones of the woman, who stares
\nfrom an oval in the parlor.<\/p>\n
* * *
\nI forked the brambly hay down to you
\nin nineteen-fifty. I delved my hands deep
\nin the winter grass of your hair.<\/p>\n
When the shearer cut to your nakedness in April
\nand you dropped black eyes in shame,
\nhiding in barnyard corners, unable to hide,
\nI brought grain to raise your spirits,
\nand ten thousand years
\nwound us through pasture and hayfield together,
\nthreads of us woven
\ntogether, three hundred generations
\nfrom Africa\u2019s hills to New Hampshire\u2019s.<\/p>\n
* * *
\nYou were not shrewd like the pig.
\nYou were not strong like the horse.
\nYou were not brave like the rooster.<\/p>\n
Yet none of the others looked like a lump of granite
\nthat grew hair,
\nand none of the others
\ncarried white fleece as soft as dandelion seed
\naround a black face,
\nand none of them sang such a flat and sociable song.<\/p>\n
* * *
\nNow the black-faced sheep have wandered and will not return,
\neven if I should search the valleys
\nand call \u201cKe-day,\u201d as if I brought them salt.
\nNow the railroad draws
\na line of rust through the valley. Birch, pine, and maple
\nlean from cellarholes
\nand cover the dead pastures of Ragged Mountain
\nexcept where machines make snow
\nand cables pull money up hill, to slide back down.<\/p>\n
* * *
\nAt South Danbury Church twelve of us sit\u2014
\ncousins and aunts, sons\u2014
\nwhere the great-grandfathers of the forty-acre farms
\nfilled every pew.
\nI look out the window at summer places,
\nat Boston lawyers\u2019 houses
\nwith swimming pools cunningly added to cowsheds,
\nand we read an old poem aloud, about Israel\u2019s sheep,
\nold lumps of wool, and we read<\/p>\n
that the rich farmer, though he names his farm for himself,
\ntakes nothing into his grave;
\nthat even if people praise us, because we are successful,
\nwe will go under the ground
\nto meet our ancestors collected there in the darkness;
\nthat we are all of us sheep, and death is our shepherd,
\nand we die as the animals die.<\/p>\n
-Donald Hall<\/em><\/p>\n\n Ruminant pillows! Gregarious soft boulders! If one of you found a gap in a stone wall, the rest of you\u2014rams, ewes, bucks, wethers, lambs; mothers and daughters, old grandfather-father, cousins and aunts, small bleating sons \u2014 followed onward, stupid as sheep, wherever your leader\u2019s sheep-brain wandered to. My grandfather spent all day searching the valley […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2341,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3917"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2341"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3917"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3918,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3917\/revisions\/3918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}