He could never walk his land without...

A poem.

He could never walk his land without
 somehow tending it, too,
 whether by truing up a fencepost,
 boundary marker or sapling;
 uprooting the invasive weeds
 creeping along the pasture edge;
 lifting a dead branch off the wire fence
 tracing the line between pasture
 and woodlot – or simply gazing
 at the swell of it all, as if checking
 a sleeping child's breathing.
 Today he whistled for the horses,
 then bent, his body a question mark,
 and gently plucked from the soil
 of the cow-cropped clover an
 arrowhead, whole, and so point-perfect
 it might have been chiseled that morning.
 He slipped it in his pocket and
 walked on, fingering its cherty edges
 marveling at what he thought of as luck –
 never once calculating the time he'd spent
 walking his farm.
  – Sue Wunder