Sharpening Day, Chasing Buzzards and the Poetry of Handtools

The files skates across the axe edge. A rasp of a sound whose pitch rises as you push the file across the curved shoulder of the bit. It sounds like a question being asked of the blade. Sharpyet? Sharpyet?

Tools are lined up. Axes. Knives. A Tramontina machete. Pocket knives and fixed blade knives. The bramble basher. The day is clear. Bright. Scraped clean of the last trace of winter. Frost gave way to a warmth too hot for a coat. The bees crowd the entrance to their hives. Small clouds of them drift here and there hunting the hazel and willow pollen of the farm. I’m sneezing again, working in the unseen drifts of pollen. Some little primrose nectar too perhaps. The bees find the drifts of snowdrops by the house. Crowd into the bright bells of the flowers. Bundles of bright orange wax from their work clinging to their legs. Food for building more bees. The precious protein of the pollinator world.

I scrape the rust from a knife with a coarse stone. Found it this morning in a pocket in the shed. Carbon steel blade now brown with powdery rust. Sharpness blunted by time, damp and neglect. Water on the stones, the rust becoming the blades own polish as it abrades off, combines with the water and its own roughness polishes the blade clean of itself.

The machete I use for limbing pine and spruce trees. The blade snicks through the branches, it peals like a bell with each clean cut. The song of the woodswoman or man. The ring and ting of cleanly swung steel pinging off tree limbs. The blade picks up resin. The hard knotted spines of pine take bites out of the blades edge. By seasons end it is a hard worked thing. The flat broad edge of the blade has a patina of neglectful use. Old sap and resin. Jagged bites along the blade where the wood was knotted.

The axe too, small semi circles bitten from it’s edge like chipped teeth. Spruce takes a toll when you limb it or fell a tree. This work too it’s own song. The bite of an axe, it’s sound shatters the silence that again smothers it. There is no quiet like the woods swallowing a sound. The syncopations of axe work disappear and never were in the woods.

I set to work in the bright and warmth. The delicate hiss of water stones on steel. The work well done. Satisfying. Work that yields good to the worker, a harvest of sharp tools well honed. As Heaney had it, “tastily finished and trim and right for the hand…and best thing of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell”. No better poetry than to take the axe and feel the shiver of the work in the handle as the forest sucks all sound from the world and stows it in moss and depth and time. The worker covered in sweat and breath and a quiet that settles in you. Stowed in moss and depth and time I am too.

The birdsong builds around me as the morning climbs into afternoon. A mistle thrush hisses and spits in a Spring rage at me as I pass by with tools. Great tits metallic siren call in the woods. The wren with it’s trilling “check check check”. The calls soften and are swallowed into quiet. In the distance the mewling call of the courting buzzards. They cross the farm, one following the other, a fields distance between them. One calls from a roost in the spruce woods beside the farm. The other from a roost somewhere close. Perhaps in our alder copse. They chase one another at a leisurely pace. Call. Return. Call again. I follow down the drive, up the hill and across the road until I lose them as they cross the woods and descend the valley. In their slow grace. The wingsan the height of my eldest child and more. There are things with words I cannot catch. This pair glide beyond my skill to follow. Slowly. Slowly. The bird calls pick up again.

Each of these blades to be made trim and smart and sharp, smooth on their flat side to the touch, sharp enough to peel slivers from a finger nail.

The bramble basher, a long curved blade with a tongues shape to it’s tip, made for great looping swings as you walk, to snick with it’s own pealing ring, as it slices through brambles and thistles to clear the field. It too has it’s own song and rhythm. Its own dance. Take two steps then swing and snick and peal and sing then step two again and swing. Each tool when well balanced and played in the hand has it’s own song I suppose.

The files rasps and cuts and asks it’s question of the metal. Sharpyet? The stones hiss. Today I sharpen to the nail. The blades need only for the rough and tumble work of the farm. Opening bales. Cutting fleece that traps a sheep in bramble or wire. Taking slices of thick rush where they short a fenceline. Slicing fingerthick brambles that hang down over the electric lines. Sharp enough still to pare a goat hoof if needed. Cleanly. Well. With precision and little force.

I am not religious about my sharpened knives. Or anything really. But this world and work might be as close as I get.