Nobody in "Farm workers" is ever called a worker. The title is the only place the labourers are named, and inside the poem they dissolve into a plain "we see", a group of onlookers, and into something far less visible: "the weight of the present." That choice of what to show and what to withhold drives the whole poem. The people who do the work are implied, and the work itself arrives as an abstraction.
The poem is built as one drifting sentence, with no capitals and no full stops, cut into three couplets. Read across the line breaks, it says that we see the weight of the present "take pains to deserve / a bit of rain." The grammar gives an abstract noun a human task. Time, or the burden of the moment, becomes a labourer who has to earn something. "Present" can also mean a gift, so the phrase may carry a faint pun, though that is an inference and the poem never insists on it. "Take pains" is an everyday idiom for effort, but set beside "weight" it recovers its literal sense of aching and hurt. Even the bare idiom hints at bodies bent over fields.
Sound does a lot of quiet work in so short a poem. There is no rhyme scheme, but the long *a* runs through "weight," "take," "pains" and "rain," so that effort and relief are linked by vowel before they are linked by sense. "Pains" and "rain" nearly rhyme, one tucked inside a line and one closing it, which makes the weather sound like the answer to the ache. Then there is "see" in the first line and "sea" in the fifth, a homophone that bookends the poem. The act of looking at the farm turns into the image of a vast green surface, as though the watching eye has dissolved the field into water. The lines are short, mostly four to six syllables, so the poem moves in small steps and never gets the length to settle comfortably.
The word "deserve" is the moral hinge. Rain is weather and has no opinion about anyone, yet the poem frames it as something to be merited, and the modest "a bit of" shows how little is being asked. That phrasing sounds like people who bargain with the sky and do not expect much. It also sets up the poem's discomfort, because the last couplet complicates the idea of deserving.
"Green as the sea" is deliberately loose. Syntactically it could describe the rain, the fields, the farm or even the workers themselves, and the line break gives the reader no way to decide. Green is the colour of growth, but the sea comparison also suggests something huge, indifferent and hard to cross. Then the poem ends on "having spent hours killing." Nothing follows. We are not told who has been killing, since the participle has no clear subject, and we are not told what has been killed. Given the title, a reader might guess weeds, pests or animals, the unglamorous violence that makes crops possible, but that is only a guess. The poem stops on the verb and lets the missing object hang in the air.
That unfinished ending is what makes the poem worth reading. It sets two ideas side by side without resolving them: a longing for gentle, deserved rain and the plain fact that farming involves hours of killing. A more sentimental pastoral would have kept the rain and dropped the verb. Here the harsh word gets the final position, which makes the "deserve" of the earlier couplet sound less innocent. What does it take to deserve rain, and does this work count in the poem's favour or against it?
Because there is no closing punctuation, the sentence seems to run on past the bottom of the page, and the reader is left to finish it. The poem also never explains itself, trusting a few concrete words, a handful of echoing sounds and one deliberately severed phrase to carry a moral tension that a longer poem might have spelled out and weakened.