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Driving around the state this summer and fall, we have eyed the withering corn, feeling a tinge of the gut-wrenching  despair we imagine  in the farmers, who planted in such industry and optimism in the spring. After many years away, I am back in my terrain of origin, fields of rustling corn spreading in every direction, sedimentary layers of landscape falling away from sight. This poem brought it all together for me. Home
by Bruce Weigl
I didn't know I was grateful             for such late-autumn                         bent-up cornfields yellow in the after-harvest              sun before the                         cold plow turns it all over into never.             I didn't know                         I would enter this music that translates the world              back into dirt fields                          that have always called to me as if I were a thing               come from the dirt,                           like a tuber, or like a needful boy. End              Lonely days, I believe. End the exiled                            and unraveling strangeness.
From The Unraveling Strangeness by Bruce Weigl, published by Grove/Atlantic. Copyright © 2003 by Bruce Weigl. All rights reserved. Mary, for the Poplar Grove Muse