Dave Bonta imagines scythes as diplomats left behind by a vanished country, the farming world where they once mattered. With no one to speak for them, they turn to each other. Their translator, the whetstone, has gone off to join the knives, which suggests that sharpening and cutting have drifted into newer, smaller, more modern uses.
The speaker treats them with tenderness and a little humor. They are "long in the tooth," old and worn, yet still graceful, curved like the letter s and compared to Moses's staff at the moment it became a snake. That comparison gives them a hint of lingering magic. The ending turns their memory into a quiet, eerie image: crowds "lose their heads" and stand stiff like soldiers as the wind passes through. It seems to describe grain falling before the blade, though the poem never says so outright. The mood is wistful, gently funny, and slightly haunting, an elegy for a lost way of working.