The old farmer’s hands hung off sinewy arms,
as though they were constantly holding chocks
for tractor wheels. Hands trained to clench and twist the wrench
or caress with a particular snaking motion down the teats of each udder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Head was permanently bent forward from leaning
mornings and nights against
the cow\u2019s solid mass. As he milked,
he took comfort in her bristly hair
and was rocked by her breath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His wife had never been further than the next county
for all their married life
She alone knew the volcano
that underlay his quiet simplicity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes at night he shouted and threw his fists,
grasped wildly, dreaming of the horses in France.
In sleep, his hands strained to touch them,
soothe the fright,
fight off the hurt consuming them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She knew the boy who enlisted back in that Great War
to handle war steeds
never came home.
In his place was the quiet farmer
and his dreams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The old farmer’s hands hung off sinewy arms, as though they were constantly holding chocks for tractor wheels. Hands trained to clench and twist the wrench or caress with a particular snaking motion down the teats of each udder. Head was permanently bent forward from leaning mornings and nights against the cow\u2019s solid mass. As he milked, he took comfort in … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":910,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/tracy-adams-ykUSPlAGZAI-unsplash.jpg?fit=640%2C427&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=876"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":880,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876\/revisions\/880"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Katherine Leonard grew up in the US and Italy living in Massachusetts at the time of John F Kennedy’s assassination and experienced segregation and Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s assassination as a high school student in rural Texas. She has been a chemist, a geologist and an oncology nurse\/nurse practitioner.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"