Driving along a country road these days, you’re apt to see many round bales, either dotting the field or lined up end to end in neat rows. Many of these are straw bales, used for bedding cattle during the winter; my verse is about bales of hay. In winter the deer bother these, cutting the mesh with their sharp hooves and pulling out tufts of hay.
Summer, Baled
Richness of earth,
warmth of sunshine,
rains of heaven, farmer sweat.
Summer, captured in clover.
Cut, sun-ripened,
then rolled and bound.
Scattered in prairie fields
at random or neatly aligned.
Summer, bundled in bronze.
Snow-disguised, benign lumps
wind-dusted betimes, garnished
with a hawk, a raven or two.
Summer, frozen and frosted.
Hungry deer pull and munch
the sweet strands of summer,
certain it’s all done for them.
Complacent cows nosing
disrupt cozy-nesting families
of summer-fattened mice.
Christine's Collection 
I love this. It describes my world.
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Today we’re watching a passing “Alberta clipper” dust everything with snow again. Not sure what you call a passing blizzard? something Canadian probably. 😉
I read an account of an Alberta cowhand circa 1905–before ranchers put up hay for cattle–and he describes how so many animals drifted and starved to death because of freak weather which left a thick layer of ice over the snow in pastures — and then it stayed for weeks.
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Yep. Those storms hit here, too. They don’t always come from Canada, often from the Gulf of Mexico, sometimes from the north. The stories of ranchers going out and getting their cattle in blizzards were part of my growing up. In the project I’m doing for the local museum right now there are a lot of those stories, ranchers going out, finding a frozen cow and a still alive calf and bringing the calf in on the front of their saddle. My aunt had a reproduction of a painting of that. I think it was a phenomenon of her youth.
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