The Hay of Yesteryear
Marilyn Nelson
Funny, how good hay tastes. You’d never think it to look
at it, all dried-up and brittle, like something winter dead,
like straw. But hay is sweet and juicy. It doesn’t lose
its flavor like gum does after a few delicious minutes
so you have to stick it under the rim of your desk, where
you feel it every few days getting harder and harder
until it’s a rock embossed with your small fingerprints.
If you got caught chewing gum, Mrs. Krull made you chew
a cud for the rest of the day. She lived on a farm, and kept hay
in the bottom right-hand drawer of her desk. It smelled good
when she opened the drawer, and her eyes twinkled
when she gave you a bunch of stems, even though she said
she was getting sick and tired of watching a roomful
of children chewing contentedly during silent reading.
All of us girls have chewed cuds by now.
We keep them during recess, even, as we gallop
around the grassy part of the playground in pastel dresses,
playing horses. We whinny, neigh, paw the ground with scuffed
saddle oxfords, the taste of hay in our mouths making us feel
like real wild ponies. We shake our manes in the wind;
we thunder around the little kids on the swings and seesaws,
around the boys’ ball games, and the teacher with the whistle.
We are free, untamed, unnamed, untouched, unridden.
Our plains know no fences. In our nostrils, the fragrance of spring.
