Morning Thanks--the art of a little poem about dad

Silo Solo

My father climbs into the silo.
He has come, rung by rung,
up the wooden trail that scales
that tall belly of cement.

It's winter, twenty below zero,
He can hear the wind overhead.
The silage beneath his boots
is so frozen it has no smell.

My father takes up a pick-ax
and chops away a layer of silage.
He works neatly, counter-clockwise
under a yellow light,

then lifts the chunks with a pitchfork
and throws them down the chute.
They break as they fall
and rattle far below.

His breath comes out in clouds,
his fingers begin to ache, but
he skims off another layer

where the frost is forming 

and begins to sing, "You are my
sunshine, my only sunshine."

1) It's the anniversary of her father's death, and Joyce Sutphen is remembering him with the kind of honor and devotion she considers worthy of him. A moment from her childhood comes to her--her father in the frozen Minnesota cold way up top in the silo doing the thankless work that had to be done, singing a song that couldn't have been any more impossible than it was beautiful had that song come from heaven. Joyce Sutphen's poem offers blessed homage, and it's beloved testimony is just plain beautiful.

2) You're just not sure, you know?--I mean, life seems so meaningless sometimes, so just plain wearying, all of us scrambling hither and yon like the mice you scared up and out of the nest when you moved the lawn mower for the first time that spring Saturday. We all operate at a frantic, out-of-control pace that you know can't be sustained. That's the race Joyce Sutphen finds herself in when, one day, one morning, she remembers her father on a morning in the silo, long, long ago. She's can't believe it herself. She's wishing for his sense of calling, his incredible--even miraculous--assurance of peace. The poem's message is peace.

3) If you want to understand the Trump phenomenon, start here. This plain old farmer, I'm sure, flew a Trump flag. He is the hero of the American dream, a white guy so blessedly driven and blessed by this country and its opportunities that he sings in what lazy, citifield liberal dems would think of the kind of place their own grandfathers did everything they could to get  them out of--"You are My Sunshine" and frozen silage in the Minnesota cold? Sure--no sweat. But who cares about this guy? Trump, and Trump only. Trump gets it. He hates the elites too. This sweet little poem bleeds politics.

4) It's a moral lesson, something of a sermon, in the old biblical sense of "calling." This great farmer from the fifties had it in hand and heart, that elusive gift of knowing that your passion meeting God's own need. He's feeding the world, and he knows it and he loves it, no matter if he's got to stand on his head in manure. This is exactly the kind of poem our nation's schoolrooms could use more of, a poem that helps kids understand how to move into their own futures.

My guess is there are more "meanings" to the poem, more, that is, than the four options I've listed. Me?--I'd say the first fits most comfortably, although the Calvinist in me likes the fourth too. And the second. And #3 too because it seems to me that a rural, white man these days is at the heart of the Trump phenomenon--and only there. He doesn't see himself featured on TV unless he's at a Trump rally. 

All stories are C's actually, an old friend of mine used to say; they're not O's. All stories leave a gap for the reader to fill in. Poems, like stories, are not puzzles, but they can be puzzling because they require our participation. A poem or story that has no mystery is not a poem or story; it's marketing or preaching.

There may well be other options to this very simple bit of homage to a man who loves his work and his life, but that it offers all or some of what I've offered is at least part of the reason people call a darling little homey poem about frozen silage. . .art.

This morning I'm thankful for the art of this wonderful little Joyce Sutphen poem.