Plowing through Ashes

by Walter McDonald

After frost, grain-sorghum stubble
yellow as wheat
hid pairs of pheasants
scattered on the plains.
Seven, eight times a season
we searched the rows,
shotguns stiff, dogs sniffing ahead,
and took our necessary meat.

After the last snow
we torched the stalks,
the orange flames
spreading like a prairie fire,
covering the fields with soot.

March, after the dirt cooled,
my father plowed the charred
earth brown again,
like flipping a reversible jacket
seam by seam.
Unless it rained, he ditched,
for two weeks irrigated,
and in May
he rigged the tractor up,
lowered four worn plows
into the ground
and planted grain.

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