The speaker looks at an old hatchet hanging in his home and thinks about everything it has been. It once killed poultry every week and was sharpened often, so that new brightness showed through old rust. Now it hangs idle, and he admires its practical design: the hammer-like back, the balance, the way it rests on two nails.
Then the poem widens. The speaker recalls seeing a hatchet in a Pittsburgh museum that doubled as a peace pipe, a tool for both violence and diplomacy. Its job, he says, was to pretend at death, be buried, and be dug up again when needed. That makes it "a sacred thing" that passes between roles.
The tone is affectionate, wry, and quietly sober. The ending is the sharpest turn: a hatchet can carve its own replacement handle, and, as Confucius noted, the pattern for it is always close at hand. The mood suggests that tools, and perhaps people, contain the models of their own renewal.