Six Arrows Farm

When I was a little girl, Mama used to read poems from play-worn volumes, filled to the brim with lovely, captivating words and the beautiful illustrations of good artists that leapt out of the pages and smiled up at me like old friends. Those afternoons filled with our mother’s low sweet voice drawing us into a beautiful world through verse impressed on my heart a love not only for reading, but especially of the tuneless songs of language we called poetry. They turn over in my head faster than I can name them, these old favorites that steal into the mind with a kind of power of memory that comes with the well-spent golden hours of childhood. The valuable moral lessons they still sing are often indelible. I remember A Good Play (R. L. Stevenson), the kind of poem that makes you want to jump up and play with a will. In The Village Blacksmith (Longfellow) the remarkable integrity, firmness of character and purpose mixed with infinite tenderness and singular love called up the noblest of aspirations. Daddy and Mama hung My Little Sister (“I have a little sister, she is only two years old;” Unknown) on our wall so that I knew it by heart from childhood, and more often than not, considered it ruefully after being less than kind to a sibling.

The poem that fairly leapt to mind again the other day was The Wind, by Robert Louis Stevenson. We were processing chickens, not exactly the most stirring or thought-provoking of occupations, when several great gusts rushed down over the ridge and charged into our valley like an express train, wailing and roaring till the trees looked like girls tossing their hair. It was a strong wind, the rollicking kind that sends your heart into your toes with a foreboding sense of helplessness and then soaring up and away with a wild kind of exaltation.

I saw you toss the kites on high

And blow the birds about the sky;

And all around I heard you pass,

Like ladies' skirts across the grass--

O wind, a-blowing all day long,

O wind, that sings so loud a song!

I saw the different things you did,

But always you yourself you hid.
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all--
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!

O you that are so strong and cold,
O blower, are you young or old?
Are you a beast of field and tree,
Or just a stronger child than me?
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!

~Robert Lewis Stevenson

As a child, I never understood the questions at the end of the poem, but I recognized the unspoken mystery of the wind. The wind is one of the first things to teach us our own smallness. We can neither control it, nor ever completely understand it. After all, the weather man may predict it, and the scientist delineate in certain terms how it works, but why it blows…this is beyond the comprehension of human thought, and even little children unconsciously know it. I am reminded in it of the breath of God; that presence that fills the soul with wonderful, terrible fear, boundless awe and ceaseless joy.

I walked my garden in the heat of the day,

And buried my feet in the sun-baked clay;

And smelt the grass ripen, kissed of the sun,

That roams his dominion till day is done.

The wind brushed my arm on his way by

And whispered the strangest of lullabies.

Wild, strong and sweet his song still rings,

In my ears, of the plenty that summer brings.

Wind’s words, though I hearken, he cannot form,

Be his breath a breeze or high summer storm;

Yet perforce plays his melody at the command

Of thundering Word and prevailing Hand.

The earth bears its fruit and sky yields rain

And grass in the fields dies and ripens again.

How much more shall I than the mindless soil

Yield to His glory my heart, will and toil?

~EKL

This summer day is hot and languishing in the sun, the machines mixing bread grind away, and the rich strains of the Cleveland Quartet weave tales of the American countryside through the haunting melodies and harmonies of Dvorak’s 12th and 14th String Quartets. Everybody else is harvesting!

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows

Anyone who reads Gene Stratton Porter will recognize these… A dear friend, who read Gene Stratton Porter to her children, sent these to us. They are prolific, just like the story reads. And they taste like grapes.