In this week’s poem, Peter Beckford offers a rich list of wants, all deliciously attuned to the cooler seasons ahead. I love how tangible and tactile this list is, with its logs to ride, thick doors to carve and wonderfully endless holes to dig.

Beckford is a farmer and poet, among other things – like box builder, piper and performer of the poetry of Holman F. Day. He lives in Liberty.

A Few Things I Want Today
By Peter Beckford

I want our firewood to be stone dry and handy.
I want a tight house
that will heat with a candle or two cords,
so little that I can cut and move it
with a sled made of downhill skis and oak slats.
Piled with a half dozen four foots, it will pull
easily, or better than that,
I’ll be riding downhill on the logs,
gravity driving, snow flying
to the road.
I want my work to be riding logs.

And I want to dig a hole for a root cellar.
I want to burrow into the hillside,
piling soil and setting aside stones
that will form and bank the walls.
I’ll get to build a thick door
with a carved rune for protection.
We need the vegetable storage
but it seems I want the digging too,
given all the reasons that keep
a shovel in my hand:
potatoes, post holes, outhouse, fruit trees,
the snow, and the eight thousand perennials
I dug last spring.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “In Praise of Minor,” copyright 2024 by Peter Beckford, appears by permission of the author.