Buckwheat Harvest: Summer - 1868-74 - Oil on canvas,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Buckwheat Harvest
The ground is Norman - windswept coastal soil
As thin as seed-and-harvest time is short.
Too poor for oxen trampling out the grain
And yet a place where hardy buckwheat grows.
In stubble, bent-backed women bind and tie
The pink-white flower-heads in shocks,
Then shoulder them or push square-basket sleds
Toward circled threshers raising up dead limbs.
Like some archaic pagan sacrifice,
Men thrash split stalks and chaff to free the seed.
On with a pitchfork tosses straw on fire
Whose winnowed smoke spreads high in cirrus skies.
The church in distant Gruchy's barely seen
Between these gatherings of germ and cloud,
Its steeple pitched, a shock of headed stone
To rocky backs that bow toward toil alone.
David Middleton - The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-François Millet
Used with permission of the author. I wrote to Louisiana State University Press for their permission, but they never responded, so I post the poem under the assumption that I've stayed within the bounds of fair use.
David is a member of my church, and I've long admired his poetry. He writes with an earthiness and an economy of words that evoke the images in Millet's painting wonderfully well and then moves us beyond the paintings to reflect further on the deeper meaning in his words. Amongst his several books of poetry, I also highly recommend Beyond the Chandeleurs.
Image from the Web Gallery of Art.
