Butchering Day
High through the sky see the homing birds sailing --
It's butchering time
Frost on the fences, on picket and paling--
Hear the weird winter wind whining and wailing,
The warmth and the daylight are flitting and
failing --
It's hog-killing time.
The season of feasting has come with the fall,
And the digging of yams.
The corn-fattened oxen are sleek in the stall
And the hogs are all hams.
The hands of the harvest have come from their
toiling,
They've set the black pot full of water a-boiling,
There's a jangle of knives and the whetstone they're
oiling--
It's butchering time.
The women have laid down their sewin' and stitchin',
There's a stir in the place
And their laughter and chatter reflects from the kitchen--
The joy of the chase.
For old primal passions are stirring again,
And a wave of the cave-dweller days on their ken
Lures them keen on the blood-sprinkled trail of the men--
At butchering time.
The porker is squealing the pangs of his. fear,
For the chase has grown hot.
His cry is like music to every ear,
It's a flash of the cave man pursuing the deer,
It's the lusty and blood-shedding time of the year,
And the moment of rapture and capture is here--
There's the sound of a shot
The prey has gone down and the men with a shout
Plunge a knife in its heart and the life gurgles out,
In the old feeding lot.
And the women come out with a smile on each face
To their part in the task
As our foremothers followed the men to the chase
In an age that is hid in the hazes of space
And Time's motionless mask.
But we know that the past surges back in our veins
At the terrified cry,
And the fever of conquest lights up in our brains,
And the blood-lust in eye;
And the best day of all, in the lap of the fall
With its multifold charm,
In the thick of the fray upon butchering day--
On the farm.
__C. L. Edson
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