The Separator Shed

The separator shed had
two separators. The dark
old oily one was dysfunctional when
it came to milk, but then there was
the then newish-fangled streamline-trim
blue separator in daily use for turning
our cow’s raw milk into skim and cream
which was patted out into kitchen butter.
Milk was separated once, maybe twice
a day, the shed used as if an outside
bathroom of animal ablutions
which kept the world healthy.

The other separator had lost
the daily milk of its bathroom plumbing,
but its larger handle was on a ratchet
and its big vertical circles geared down
to a top heavy flywheel on the horizontal,
which me and my brothers would spin
fast as we could, with the tempo of its hum
pitching up higher and higher, rising the
thinner scales as we gave young muscle to its crank,
till the freewheeling weight was sounding
as if to take off like a rocket, shaking that
weatherboard shed, roaring up for the separation
of small boys in dreams out of the dust
and spiderwebs in that daily shed’s benches.

Up and up we went, above the yard, over the dirt
of the farm, it wheeled up into ice-cream
sound tracks - to the jet-roads of the clouds.

2 Feb 2006 © Wayne David Knoll
'The Cascades' Stony Creek, East Monbulk, Victoria