Steve Whitaker, Literary Editor

Poem Of The Week: The Men Who Drive Tractors By Wendy Pratt

The Men Who Drive Tractors

Some of the men drive tractors
too fast down the lane
as if they are riding a great red bull

into a Greek myth and my existence
is as background to their story.
I have lived in many places

and this is often how the story is told:
I am so often the tree or the fence
and so rarely the bird singing at dusk,

stopping the world.


The Minotaur-like aggression of the velocitous tractor drivers in Wendy Pratt’s perspicacious poem shares some commerce with the outrageous hubris of the boy Icarus as he careens into the Mediterranean in W.H. Auden’s ‘Musée de Beaux Arts’. Auden, contemplating a Breughel canvas in a French art gallery, meets the bluff and the bluster, the astonishing appearance of a mythical figure in the sea, with unexpected indifference to the remarkable phenomenon, as a ploughman on the shore goes about his business and a ship sails away.

By reverse inference, Pratt’s narrator may not be consigned to the margins, with only the Milton-esque consolation of those who ‘also serve’. For her silent observance, her figurative reduction to the level of ‘the tree or the fence’ – signifiers, perhaps, of female subjection – is ambushed in the very act of creation. The poet, with deliberately languid pacing, slows the machinery of self-aggrandising haste as she quietly takes the reins and becomes, in this beautifully distilled poem, the creature she so admires – ‘the bird singing at dusk, / stopping the world.’


‘The Men Who Drive Tractors’ is taken from Blackbird Singing at Dusk, published by Nine Arches Press (2024). The poem is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.

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