Fields by Wyatt Prunty - The New Criterion

Poems

January 2007

Fields

Burke

was right!

Furrowed as the heaviest brow yet plain
As our forgetfulness, they are unmoved
By change the way all origins lie stilled
By what they start. Long genealogies
Of fields rest in courthouse records
But lack what came before, generations
Nameless and permanent as need.

Rain, and the broadest reaches go under;
Drought, and they are dust. But always these remain.
To die down to stubble, to disappear,
Then rise from dark into the leaf-long change
Of new life: this carries more than reason
Gathers in its mirrors, as being fertile
After freezing cold or swallowing flood
Bears more than powers know to plant.

Wyatt Prunty's Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems is available from Johns Hopkins University Press.

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