I bought an antique scythe

It's a long time since I posted anything, and much longer since I wrote a poem (other than haiku). So this is, I hope, a sign of a return to more writing after a long, dry period.

I bought an antique scythe

I bought an antique two-handed

agricultural scythe. A joke:

I looked as risible as death

in the small shop’s mottled mirror

and remembered through my child’s eyes,

crow-sharp and credulous, watching

two men ecstatically swaying,

to the swing of the wheat as it fell:

an easy labour, not scything

but smoking, talking men’s talk, spitting

on stones. This is no time for grief;

I have lost the loss of the scythe.

The curved snath, weathered and bent round

generations of peasants, tall

as a reaper, the curlew blade

dulled, like history, from disuse.

Eyes never saw what my memory recalled

collaged it from folk song, old film,

willed-dream: mowing is mechanised,

misbeliefs purchased with credit.

I shall scour the sweat from its shaft,

burnish the blade and sheath its edge,

fix it to a wall, exhibition

of beyond recollection or,

more daring, set it over a door

dead-locked against the past;

and accidents.