Night Barn
Life on the Land: a Mystery
What was I expecting
of the old barn’s pride
dissolved in the dreaming of the haymakers?
Who set you free
from our mad pace to drift here in silence,
you huge, leaning, wooden mass?
Where is your builder now?
Has all the work of your carpenters gone,
peeled with the paint?
Did I expect the heavy door to coax in summer air
where reeking cattle smells are stale?
Where are your summer dreams?
Where the urgent longings
of farm hands who searched to find their souls?
Sun can’t filter through the grimy yellowed pains of glass
to light the alley set with straw.
No boot yet falls upon the well-worn floors,
with paths around feel barrels
where yellowed light strains to scan the cob and molding wall.
Are loosened boards and broken forks your only wares?
Can cobwebs hold the aged, leaning feedbox,
filled with crusted, browned dead hay?
What cow last fed and long possessed its stall?
What reckless youth have tossed their cares to tumbling hay
their voices now turned deep with anxiousness
while bucking calves have long since died of age?
Why a Poem?
To live close to the land is to enter a language older than our own. The turning seasons, the labor of tending, the quiet generosity of the harvest—these speak in rhythms more than in reasons.
Poetry listens for those rhythms. It gathers the work of our hands and the gratitude of our hearts into words that can be shared, much like the fruits of the garden themselves. And in that sharing, something essential is preserved: the sense that what we receive from the earth is never only for ourselves.
This lovely poem and all the poetry on this website come from Bill Huebsch.
The Land We Love
When the Soil Speaks
Here is the garden speaking—
a wise, patient, and quietly joyful third partner
in our shared labor.
Its voice is contemplative and lyrical,
echoing the earth’s own slow, ancient knowing.
I have watched you come to me each year,
hands full of hope,
hearts carrying the tender weight
of what you dare to dream together.
I open myself to you—
furrows of dark, forgiving soil—
and wait for your footsteps
to mark the beginning of the season.
As I feel your hands planting seeds
within my welcoming loam,
I know you are planting yourselves:
your hopes—
your dreams of a summer harvest.
Every gesture you make—
the clearing of stones,
the patient and careful placing of roots,
the gentle firming of soil around a stem—
presses your lives deeper into mine.
I receive it all.
I hold it, quietly transforming it
with rain and sun
and the old alchemy of time.
Do you know how I listen
when you work side by side?
I feel the rhythm of your breaths,
the murmured planning,
the laughter that rises like birds
released from winter.
Even your silence feeds me—
rich loam for the roots of devotion.
And when your hopes falter,
when seedlings cannot survive,
when weather turns and dreams lie bruised,
when my cousin the rabbit finds a meal,
I do not judge
for I am the keeper of second chances.
Here, nothing is wasted,
not even sorrow;
it composts into nourishment
for the next bright vow.
Each spring you return
as if the world were beginning again.
And I rise to meet you—
pushing up the greening cotyleldons*
reaching up out of my fertile soil
to let the miracle of photosynthesis begin.
Thus, is born all we make together.
These shoots are my reply,
my way of saying:
I remember you.
I flourish because you do.
So plant your dreams in me once more.
Tend what love pronounces quietly
in the turning of the soil.
For I am your companion in this liturgy—
older than your names,
and younger than your hopes.
Cotyledons
A cotyledon is the plant’s first “seed leaf,” part of the embryo and the earliest leaf to appear as a seed begins to grow. Botanists use these first leaves to help classify flowering plants: one cotyledon marks a monocot, two a dicot. Some plants—like many orchids with tiny seeds—have no visible cotyledon at all and are called acotyledons.
Walking the Land We Cannot Own
We are its current keepers—others will follow us. We are stewards of a holy promise.
We walk upon a land we cannot own
and breathe her borrowed gifts into our days.
She bears our weight without complaint
and yet, at times,
lets slip the murmur of older stories—
those who passed before us,
still held within her keeping.
From mountain ridges
where the wind seems almost to pray
to shorelines shaped again and again by tide,
the land remembers motions we forget,
footfalls worn smooth by centuries of passing,
and asks us—without reproach—
to keep our direction true.
She feeds us vegetables
lifted patiently from her care,
and fruit grown full
by long acquaintance with the sun.
We touch her soil
too often with hands inclined to take,
yet even so
our hearts are schooled toward humility
by the quiet discipline of her giving.
In forests where small lives remain unseen,
in fields where seeds are granted
time and darkness enough to bloom,
we meet the steady pulse of what endures—
a holiness that does not clamor,
a grace content to wait
until we learn to call it home.
So let us walk with reverence
wherever we are set down,
listening for the patient grammar of the land.
For every root beneath our restless feet
speaks of a love not seized or mastered,
only learned—
slowly.
Teach us to share
what we were never meant to possess,
to guard what is fragile
because it has been entrusted.
Let earth, in all her restrained abundance,
shape the manner of our living
until gratitude itself
becomes our answer.