Keep Plowing Away

Keep Plowing Away

I watched my father plow, when I was a child,
The slow, straight, deliberate lines of a man trapped on the land;
When he turned and drove away I watched and admired him,
As he came near I looked away, toward the distance. 

“Hop up now and bring me the water jug
And check the fertilizer to see what I’ve got left;
Hurry boy, I don’t have all day - Coming Daddy;
It’s gonna rain and I can’t be out here forever.”

His face was burned yet his body held a strength of ancestry,
Of those who came before and struggled for their own;
He worked so that I could leave those rows of dust
To do the things he wanted, but never would.

The tractor turned, he pondered, smiled, hollered to me
“Grandma’s slow but she’s ninety-eight.”;
But he was too young to know the pain and the waste of time,
That he would be out there forever.



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