In agricultural Scots, to stook grain is to stand or group cut sheaves together in the field, allowing them to dry after reaping. In Violet Jacob’s poem, “We’ve stookit the hairst” means “We have gathered and arranged the harvest into stooks,” placing the speaker in a rural harvest setting. The word also helps preserve the poem’s Scots voice and its close connection to traditional farm work.

“Stookit” is a Scots Dialect form related to the verb stook, meaning to arrange sheaves in a stook. A stook is traditionally a group of cut grain sheaves set upright in a field to dry; the exact number of sheaves can vary by region and custom. The related word hairst means “harvest” in Scots. In this poem, “stookit” is a past-tense or past-participial form, corresponding roughly to standard English stooked or, in a less specialized translation, arranged the harvested grain. It should not be confused with “stacked”: stooking refers specifically to field-drying sheaves before they are collected into larger stacks.