Featured Poet: May 1998

Choptank women

From the sweet yeasty warmth
of the farm kitchen
in the hum and perk of dawn
I watch the sun run in rivulets
through new-tilled fields.
A breeze from the river riffles the hedgerow
and a low-lying mist rises in wisps
like spirits stirred from sleep.
Startled, a sentinel deer wheels
then stands steely in the meadow-hush
and all is still beneath the sweeping
brush of an eagle's wings
in his slow blue reconnaissance.

This is the land of the Choptank.
In tilling season, when droning
machines have ceased and the earth
is creased like a weathered face,
collectors comb for legend-bones,
sifting the soil for shards
of hard-won life. Here,
in a centuries-old sisterhood of toil,
tawny women winnowed grain,
slapping flat rocks in a solemn rhythm
of motion driven by primordial need.
Gathering their seed, they hoised baskets
toward the sky, watching the chaff fly
against a ruby sun, hungry for rest
on these procreating beds.

Now new seeds wake
in warm soil nourished
by their flesh, in rows aflame
with the same sun
that saw them buried one by one.
In these fields that yield life
from life they are sleeping, still.
Their bones give strength to stalks,
their marrow feeds the rich, rough earth
and harrowed, hallowed mounds
give birth, bursting in the light.
Across the misty fields they sigh
and I, watching from my window,
feel the wheeling of the ages.
And the ages fly: soaring, shifting,
streaming by, reflected
in the solemn eye
of the sun and the deer
and the eagle.