SBAC Practice Test 7

The Weathervane on Moreland's Barn

¹All my childhood it pointed somewhere else—

²east when we wanted rain, north before the frost,

³a tin rooster nailed to the peak of the barn

⁴announcing weather no one had ordered.

⁵My father said it was the only honest thing

⁶on the farm: it never argued with the wind,

⁷never pretended the storm was coming from

⁸a kinder direction.

⁹I thought it was a coward.

¹⁰I wanted something that would face one way

¹¹and stay there, the way the oak by the creek

¹²leaned into every gale and never moved.

¹³The oak came down the winter I turned twenty,

¹⁴split at the root by a wind it would not bend to.

¹⁵We sawed it for firewood and burned it

¹⁶for two years, and it kept us warm.

¹⁷The rooster is still up there, rust-red now,

¹⁸its thin body shoved around by every gust,

¹⁹and I have learned to read it the way my father did—

²⁰not as a thing that gives in,

²¹but as a thing that stays by knowing how to turn.