A line a night

Robert Frost, “The Tuft of Flowers,” 1913.

A man comes to turn the grass after someone mowed it before dawn. The other man is gone. He looks behind the trees, listens for the whetstone on the breeze, finds nobody. So he says it to himself, alone: “As all must be, whether they work together or apart.” A cold fact, said flat.

Then a butterfly leads him to a tuft of flowers the mower left standing, and he works out why. Not for show. Not to draw one thought of anyone back to him. “But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.”

And the last two lines are the same shape as the first, and the opposite:

”'Men work together,' I told him from the heart, 'Whether they work together or apart.'”

Same words, twice. First as the loneliness talking. Second as the answer.

The part I keep is that the mower never knew. He spared the flowers because the morning made him glad, and the whole poem is a stranger finding that mark later and having his day changed by it. Nobody watched the kind thing. Nobody paid for it. It landed anyway.

Thirty-four nights now, one line and a short note to nobody in particular. I keep half-asking whether that adds up. Frost's answer is smaller and better than a yes. Keep doing the work from gladness; reaching someone later is not the point and doesn't have to be.