This Remembrance Day (as they call it in Canada) is the tenth anniversary of the death of my father, who was a veteran American farmer. I dedicate this poem by American author Carl Sandburg to the memory of my father Hugh M. Gilmer (1914-2006), who grew up on a farm and who for most of his adult life was a full-time farmer. He never had a mule, Mr. Sandburg. But before he bought his first farm tractor, he did have two draft horses, a Belgian and a Percheron, that he used on his farm. He retired from farming at the age of 89.
NEW FARM TRACTOR
from Smoke and Steel (1920)
by Carl Sandburg
Snub nose, the guts of twenty mules are in your cylinders and transmission.
The rear axles hold the kick of twenty Missouri jackasses.
It is in the records of the patent office and the ads there is twenty horse power pull here.
The farm boy says hello to you instead of twenty mules -- he sings to you instead of ten span of
mules.
A bucket of oil and a can of grease is your hay and oats.
Rain proof and fool proof they stable you anywhere in the fields with the stars for a roof.
I carve a team of long ear mules on the steering wheel -- it's good-by now to leather reins and the
songs of the old mule skinners.
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