Wife of My Late Years

by Don Thackrey

For years I worked the farm alone, depressed.
No Eden this. Often I’d thought to leave,
Drift East like Cain — yet stayed on and was blessed
The day the God of gardens said, it’s Eve.
In waning light she came to me as wife,
And Adam surely would have understood
How second gifts enhance that first one, life.
She’s been the harvest making winter good.
At leisure now, we’re but one combined self,
Paired versions of a poem not finished quite,
Not closed up in the volumes on God’s shelf,
Still building metered lines to fence out night
And quite contented now as we spend time
To help each other make the couplet rhyme.


Don Thackrey knows the farm life from years in the Nebraska Sandhills. He now lives in Michigan with the wife described in the sonnet given here and continues to try to capture in formal verse a thousand memories of rural life.
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Pat Jones
Published 28 July 2010