A cold gray rain hammers on the roofs
as I walk across the farmyard
on the last of July,
dressed in a mid-length yellow raincoat,
a cap from Billerud Korsnäs,
and work pants from ITAB pulled up tight
and well-belted, with the big boots from Tretorn, ready
for mucking out the shelter,
while the horses Moses, Torre & Russin
graze in a distant pasture, beyond the farm buildings,
saved from mosquitoes, gnats & horseflies by the rain

I carefully avoid causing the sound of metal
against metal,
which is otherwise hard to avoid
when opening the steel gate between the farmyard
and the horses' pastures,
and which would lure the horses into a trot
up around the farm, to the shelter,
hoping for extra hay,
or even entry into their stable stalls.

Now they don't hear me,
but graze together
with their noses in the grass,
calm and serene in the rain.

Inside the safe dimness of the shelter
I pause
with the wheelbarrow's handles still
in my rain-wet hands;
the pitchfork leaning back in the barrow,
the fairy-tale atmosphere thick around my cognition
in the bunker-like space
that Anna and I set up
as an open extension of the stable building
in 2015,
just when I arrived after a two-week cycling trip
from Sörmland to Anna's farm in Norrbotten

Peace sits heavily inside, with arms crossed,
like the gathered sheltering of thousands of years
in the semi-darkness,
the two openings curtained with heavy fabrics,
that the horses,
and I with the wheelbarrow, easily pass through.

I stand still
and feel the almost timeless joy
of sheltering from the cold clatter of the rain
on the roof,
as the swallow parent at the nest
up on one of the beams in a corner,
gets anxious from my odd stillness in the shelter,
and starts circling around in the hall, under the roof,
chirping lively

The fledglings have flown for quite a while,
but all still seek shelter in the dimness
from rain and rough weather,
and when I focus my gaze in the shadows
I see a couple of heads poking up
from the otherwise abandoned swallow's nest

I wake from my rain-heavy morning meditation,
reluctantly,
and start mucking out

Then I no longer pose a threat,
and the swallow parent,
who for a while, chirping lively,
flew in and out through the opening
that Anna sawed at the top of the wall,
calms down,
and the birds remain in the hall's cozy shelter
from the forces that roar & rumble
over the shelter roof,
splashes from ancient gutters;
and gushes from vertical downspouts

The day does its part,
dressed in a sou'wester
as July washes itself
into August's magical moonlit nights,
teeming with haiku and puzzling zen koans