Ranches of cows, horses or sheep? Fields of rice, tea or wheat? Organise your orchard and pick an agricultural crop of songs to make a mass musical harvest
Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.
By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.
Paul Muldoon’s short, beautiful poem touches on many things – a secret life, a hint of tragedy, but as much as anything else it captures what can be double-edged about farming. We don’t know what happened to Brownlee, but from the outside the view is that he “should have been content” with his barley, potatoes, bullocks, milker and farmhouse. But all was not as it seemed, and farming - what may seem like the bountiful joy of growing, of producing and living of the land and culminating in harvest, might seem idyllic in theory, but clearly it is often not. Farming’s hard won rewards are fragile, and in the sudden, cold wind of an indifferent universe, they can all suddenly be gone, snuffed out like a life, blown away like straw in the breeze. And perhaps only Brownlee’s two black horses, in that poetic image, shifting their weight from foot to foot, and “gazing in to the future”, really know the truth.
The farmer lives on credit ’til the fall.
Then they take him by the hand, and they lead him through the land,
And the middle man’s the man who gets it all.
The lawyer hangs around while the butcher cuts a pound,
But the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
