Talk on the Farm

Red, Yellow and Blue

Talk on the Farm written by James Edward Hervey MacDonald

The Expert

In The Canadian Forum, January 1921, p. 118

He came to watch us put the shining car
Into his driving-shed, where wagon and rack
Waited the fulness of the fields of June;
We praised his elm trees, and his talk ran back

To father, who had dug them in the bush
And lined and set them eighty years before,
Thus saving from the hacking and the flame
Three kings who blessed the highway at his door.

Father had been a man, full six foot three
He stood, with hair of unchanged reddish brown
At seventy-five, and he had cut his farm
From the wild land new granted by the Crown.

No one more strong or temperate than he
Had swung an axe in those hard-drinking days;
He'd scorn the people now who needed law
To keep their habits close to decent ways.

But these are twisted times and folk are loose
In many things, although their laws are tight;
In speeding cars, and God, and business deals,
And woman love, they muddled up the right.

He liked a horse himself, but his grown lad
Knew every kind of car and wanted one,
And he should have it too, by harvest time,
For not a neighbour had a better son.

So flowed his talk, until he climbed again
The orchard fence to take his restless mare;
And down the lane we strolled, between the fields
That tossed their singing bobolinks in air.