June, warm, with thunderstorms—grass season.

Zero-turn mowers scuttle about the monoculture lawns

And along fencerows, like weird crustaceans,

Backward, forward, pivoting, unpredictable,

Their operators clutching the upright claws.

I think of them as crab-turn mowers,

Though unlike crabs, they can’t go sideways.

In the fields, spiked hay rakes turn the tall grass

Into windrows, not destined for the compact bales

That the shirtless boys of my youth

Once lifted effortlessly onto wagons, 

Farm boys unaware of their own strength,

Or even their transitory beauty. 

Today’s windrows will become round bales,

That weigh a ton and can crush a car

(I’ve seen it happen)

And must be lifted by machines.

A handsome word, “windrow,”

Nearly forgotten now, in steady decline

Since its peak in the agrarian 1950s, 

After its first recorded use in 1523,

To describe cut grass exposed to wind

For drying before being forked and ricked,

As there were no balers then. 

The OED offers no etymology for “windrow,”

Just a reference to “wind + row,”

“Wind” from the Old English “windan,”

Going back through Norse “vinda” to “wander,” 

And “row” tracing its lineage 

To an older source, 

A Sanskrit term for “stroke,” or “line.” 

So, each “windrow” is a “wander line,” 

Lying in a pale curve though the shorn fields.

This honest word that limns the scene

Has the feel of Norse or Saxon kennings:

Whale-road, word-hoard, earth-stepper, sea-weary,

Wood-bane, blood-ember, mist hills,

All so much more eloquent

Than the ones we use today:

Arm candy, bean counter, pencil pusher, hot potato,

Slights, in a time that has almost abandoned windrows,

I think of how these peevish modern concepts

Would have confused the marauding Vikings, 

Or been perceived as great insults, if understood,

By warriors with neither pencils nor potatoes nor candy. 

Perhaps enough to work a pause

In the violent sack of Lindisfarne in 793 AD,

Had the distraught monks been divinely inspired

To shout them out, uncomprehendingly, 

Before the mounting bale-fires consumed

Their glorious, hand-lettered, parchment books. 

Or what might the original utterer of “windrow” thought,

Standing in a hayfield in Sussex, or maybe Devon,

Admiring a hay crop brought in before ruinous rain,

Had someone responded with “motor mouth,” 

“Tree hugger,”  “tramp stamp” or “bookworm.”

But that was 1523, when Henry VIII was in his 30s,

Still trim and writing poetry, still  married to his first wife, Catherine,

Though that year he warned Henry Percy

To cool things off with Ann Boleyn.

And this is the sinuous path

By which the word “windrow” took me this morning,

In a poem that was supposed to be about

The wholesome pleasures of the month of June.

How is it that I even know “windrow?” 

Books, surely. Has to be. 

This was not the sort of language

My practical haymaking grandfathers used, 

Nor a word favored by the tanned boys

In the long ago fields of my youth,

Fields now as nearly forgotten as “windrows,”

Where the lean boys laughed with hay in their sunlit hair,

As they tossed the first golden bales of June

Onto the waiting haywagons.