Moved by the story of a friend’s family having to sell off their dairy herd, Northfield poet Barbara Lemoine woke at 2:30 in the morning and began to write.
The resulting poem, “Selling Off the Herd,” placed third in the adult category of this year’s Poet’s Seat Poetry Contest.
The annual contest, created in honor of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, the poet for whom Greenfield’s Poet’s Seat Tower was named, and sponsored by Friends of the Greenfield Library, held its 25th awards ceremony in April.
“It’s a poem about loss,” Lemoine said of “Selling Off the Herd.”
“But it’s a kind of loss I think people don’t think about that often.”
Where tourists driving by might experience dairy cows as an iconic feature of Franklin County’s bucolic rural setting, Lemoine says that managing a herd means a lot of work for farmers.
“It’s breeding, it’s taking care of all the stock,” Lemoine says.
Successful breeding means keeping track of both desirable and undesirable traits in specific cows, and then breeding them to either encourage or discourage those traits in their offspring.
Lemoine, who worked in the insurance and financial industries for more than 25 years, raised dairy goats and pigs in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
She knows, on a smaller scale, what’s involved in keeping livestock healthy and productive, and how familiar a farmer becomes with each individual animal.
People whose grandparents and parents have owned a herd before them can tell you the lineage of each animal, going back perhaps decades.
And while the herd is an investment — the means to the farmer’s livelihood — attachments and connections do develop between individual animals and farmers.
“Cows aren’t pets in the sense that a dog or a cat would be, but they’re certainly animals that you deal with on a daily basis,” Lemoine says. “And, as with children, you might have your favorites.”
She laughs as she adds, “with dairy cattle you can say which ones are your favorites, with children you can’t.”
In talking with her friend, Lemoine realized that even when a family might recognize that there are economic, health or other reasons to sell a herd, “there are some animals you hate to see go, because you don’t know what their future’s going to be. They could end up on another dairy farm or they could become someone’s food. That’s the reality of it.”
Selling a herd also often means the end of a long family legacy in farming, which can have emotional repercussions.
Lemoine says that since she wrote the poem in January, her friend’s family has developed plans to transition into other things, so it’s not as if the farm is folding.
“It’s a sad poem because it’s saying goodbye to the animals,” Lemoine says, “but it’s also a beginning, a change, and there are other things to do.”
Lemoine is pleased that her friend, who is in a twice-monthly writing group with her, says she captured the essence of a situation that she herself couldn’t write about, because she was too close to it.
And several people who don’t write poetry — or read it on a regular basis — have asked for copies of the winning poem, “because it spoke to them,” she said.
“That to me is someone who likes writing, that’s very reaffirming, to reach a larger audience,” Lemoine says.
A train goes by on the tracks across the street from the Bernardston coffee shop where we’ve chosen to meet, underlining Lemoine’s statement with a long, low whistle.
“Whether you read poetry in public, or you just write it to get words on the page, to get your emotions out so they’re not in your head bothering you, it can be cathartic to just get stuff down on paper,” Lemoine says.
Sometimes, rather than writing a nasty letter to someone, Lemoine says she can get negative feelings out of her system by writing them down. It doesn’t matter whether anyone ever sees her rant or poem.
“But I think as a poet you have to be somewhat vulnerable,” she says. “It just depends on how much you want to expose yourself.”
The advantage of putting your work out into the world is that “You can expose yourself and find out that other people have been through the same thing — or have the same feelings,” Lemoine says. “So, you’re not alone in this human condition.”
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. Crapo is always seeking published poets and writers for her column. She’s interested in books written by Franklin County poets and writers and/or published by a Franklin County press. She can be reached at: tcrapo@mac.com