Tractors

            One of the topics or settings of Sutphen’s poems involves life on a farm. Tractors frequently come up in these poems that involve farms. In Tornado Warning, she writes, “…a red/ tractor pushed through the oat field, cutting/ down gold straw and beating a stream/ of grain into the wagon trailing behind/ in the stubble.” Sutphen simply describes one way that a tractor is used on a farm, shooting a stream of straw with just one plow through a field. And In Snow at the Farm she says I watch the red tractor moving/ back and forth through the blue/ and white / world, my father's/ hands at the wheel.” The way Sutphen describes a tractor plowing through snow, and what a huge difference a person tractor can make on a tractor. She says that as the tractor plows through the snow, a whole new world emerges, all at the hands of her father. And finally, in Girl on a Tractor “I/ learned to drive a tractor at just the right/ speed, so that two/ men, walking/ on either side of the moving wagon/ could each lift a bale, walk towards/ the/ steadily arriving platform and/ simultaneously hoist the hay onto/ the rack, … /my hand on the throttle,/carefully measuring out the pace.” In this poem, Sutphen describes what it’s like when she drives a tractor, how she controls it, and what it does. The way that Sutphen describes the use of a tractor, the difference it can make, and what its like for her to drive one in her poetry tells the reader how important and ordinary their role was when she grew up on a farm.