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Tony Curtis

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The wheelbarrow

for Kevin Sinnott

After a soaking day the new lambs
come out of their huddle
and are tugging milk from their mother
faster than they can graze.
It is surely the cusp of Spring,
the last wet burden Winter makes us bear.

This Winter, just after we'd moved in,
we had a mis-hap with the dog
they'd left us with this place.
A fine guard dog -
named after a German city.
But it got out and mauled some sheep.

In the still-wet painting he is pushing the dead
weight of it up the slope deeper into the trees.
His father in law has attached a rope to the barrow
and puts his weight into the pull.

It is all dark browns and greens
in the blackness of the woods
where they will dig a grave.
He does not tell me if words were said,
and I will not give them voices.

Now with the lambs in the valley
milky and Spring-frisky
the big painting seems a memorial
of some distant, forgotten war.
This work he will not sell, but hang here
in their house in a church
with its arched windows and great curved beams.

That rainy, winter night
I see them spading down the covering
of earth, needles and leaf-mulch.
Then one of them, or both of them, sings,
or cries. Or it might be the rain
in the trees and in their eyes.

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