Dave Bonta's «Ode to Scythes» takes an obsolete tool and turns it into a delegation of stranded diplomats. The scythes are "emissaries / from a country / that no longer exists," and the joke is gentler than it first seems. The country is never named, but the poem points to a lost world of hand harvesting, where language, work and landscape all fitted together. What remains are objects with no one left to speak to. The central idea is that when a way of life disappears, its tools become survivors who carry the memory of it, and that memory is not entirely innocent.
The poem is built from three sentences, and each is shaped differently. The first runs eight lines and sets up the diplomatic fiction. The scythes "have only each other / to converse with" because their "translator / the whetstone" has "gone off / & joined the knives." The detail is funny and exact. A whetstone really does serve scythes and knives alike, so its defection to the kitchen drawer sounds like a minor official taking a job with the new regime. It also hints that the scythes' language has been lost. Without a translator, nobody understands them.
The second sentence, seven lines long, switches from comedy to a physical image. The scythes "huddle together / in corners, nested esses / long in the tooth." There is a visual pun here. Stacked blades look like a pile of letter S's, and the plural word "scythes" is itself full of them. "Long in the tooth" works twice, since it means old and also suggests a blade's edge. Then comes the poem's boldest comparison. The scythes are "still as fluid / as the staff of Moses / at the exact moment / it shifted into an asp." The poem freezes that miracle halfway through, so that the curve of the blade becomes a snake caught between wood and animal. It is a beautiful image, but a snake is also dangerous, and the biblical comparison carries a faint chill.
That chill arrives fully in the last sentence, a question the scythes murmur to one another: "Do you remember... / how / the crowds / would lose their heads / & stand like soldiers, / stiff, when the wind / moved through?" Here the poem plays on a double meaning. On one level, the "crowds" are standing grain, whose "heads" are the seed heads that fall to the blade, and the stalks do stand stiff in rows like soldiers. On another level, the words describe beheading, mass death and a battlefield. The scythes talk about the harvest the way old veterans talk about a campaign, with nostalgia that never quite admits what was done. The scythe's association with death makes this reading hard to ignore. The image of the "wind" moving through is also ambiguous, because it could be the weather bending the field or the sweep of the blade itself.
The poem's sound and layout support this shift. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short, often three or four words, which gives the poem a quiet, murmuring pace that suits its speakers. Sibilance runs through it ("scythes," "esses," "soldiers," "stiff"), as though the poem were mimicking the hiss of a blade through grass. The line breaks also do real work. "The crowds" sits alone on its line, and "would lose their heads" gets a line to itself, so the violence lands before the soldier simile softens it. The final line, "moved through?", is only two words, and it ends on a question that no one answers.
The register matters too. The ampersand, the casual phrase "went off," and the deadpan treatment of a whetstone as an interpreter give the poem a dry humor that keeps it from becoming a solemn lament for the past. Yet the humor is what makes the ending so effective. We start out feeling tender toward these old tools, and we end up noticing what they are actually fond of remembering.
What makes the poem significant is that it manages to be an elegy without pretending the past was harmless. Many poems about disappearing rural crafts praise the lost world. Bonta lets the objects themselves speak, and they give away more than they intend. In the end, the poem makes the reader share an uneasy sympathy with a thing that was built to cut.