Bruce Weigl: "Home"

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.


 

"Home" by Bruce Weigl, from The Unraveling Strangeness: Poems. © Grove Press, 2002.  

Art credit: "A corn field after combining [October, central Illinois]," photograph likely by Paula.