The Farmer's Notebook

As a young girl, I wondered what was on those pages.
I stared at the numbers, the records, the dates and I stared at you.
Skin hardened by years in the sun and the dirt.
Wheat and sheep.
Wheat and sheep was all the flat idle land would give us.

Small pools of tadpoles gasping for room in dams drying through drought.
Sheep hanging gutted and dripping onto the gravel tracks.
Bile, wool, flies and hungry dogs.
Don’t pierce the stomach, it stinks.

But everything is recorded.
Pencil to notebook in detail meticulous like the fresh lines of fallow in the house paddock.
Every detail down and safe in the pocket of your shirt.

A mystery to a young daughter.

As a woman I know what is on those pages.
Rainfall, lambing dates and phone numbers of shearers called Squid, Goofy and Pat.
I could tell you there’s an app for that now.
I stare at the numbers, the records, the dates.
I wish I was staring at you.

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This poem was Highly Commended (Teacher) for Poetry Object 2017

Judge's Notes:
"A free verse poem that reads and looks like the notebook it recalls, transfigured by memory and loss and all the years between into a taut but ragged recollection of a place and a father (perhaps) that might have been our own. In this poem of 'meticulous detail' and deep, dour affection, 'everything is recorded' 'like fresh lines of fallow in the house paddock'. And the remembered farmer feels as if he were staring fondly at the poet. At us. As if we, too, were the children of another time and place, his face the face we all had before our parents were born."
~ Mark Tredinnick, Judge, Poetry Object 2017

Watch our Poetry Object 2017 digital exhibition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TukWN1BdcPs