A farmer and writer in Kentucky, he died yesterday, leaving

The world poorer due to the absence of his life and belief

In God, goodness, the community of living things, horses over

Tractors, kindness, equality, and walking lightly on the clover.

For many years he lived with his wife in a wooden homestead

With traditional technology only, growing wheat for their bread

On fields ploughed with their horses. He found he had time enough

To walk in the woods, fish the river, talk with his lady, and rough

Out a poem or an essay in quiet verse or elegant prose. He thought

Government favour to capitalism was destroying the earth, not

by force but by the replacement of well-tested custom by Big Tech.

He opposed the Vietnam war and the death penalty, their disrespect

For life, and for the same reason he opposed Abortion, because, he argued,

It is killing. Before, there is a living creature: after, a corpse. He stood

Against the violence, finding himself alongside people who had

Nothing against killing but wanted abortion made illegal because God

Told us to multiply. His clear mind saw that when it had been illegal

Desperate poor women paid unofficial nurses who used needles

To cheat their wombs. “I am against abortion,” he said, “It is a violent

Big Tech solution to a human problem, but for the sake of pregnant

Women who do not want to be with child, I hope the state will permit

And provide it, and human beings by their wisdom not require it.”

 

 He thought, like Jesus, that we are wise when we know that our

glory can never match that of a single unemployed flower.