Fallow

Fallow

So many times

you’ve been the field where

storms hailed the crops flat,

your task to regrow them--

the cold eroded shingle

where fire died,

you with numb fingers

in a night of frost and ghosts,

the rekindler. 

So 

let me warm you now 
for that brief time

that I’m permitted

as darkness presses.

Turn the cup upside down,

let your hard hours spill out

to pool in a bottomless green.

Sleep for a season with all life unborn

you the fallow field this once

over which the placid plough horse

passes unhindered, breaking clods of years'

compaction, earth's old demands arable

and dropping open under a citrine sun.

Lightly, surely the harrow passes

in the long afternoons, a music

on those plains where ever they sing

of planting, of the green to come,

not freezes, not blight, not backs bent,

where my rain falls like ocean. Let

every tall crop there be your own.

Let me in you at last give back

seed for root

right for wrong

life for death

and make life enough

so

when time is done with us

in the dusk of a long coming gleaning,

there'll be love in the last look back

before we blow away.

~November 2011

A repost to welcome the slanting light of Fall,  and the fallow time to come

for    real toads

Open Link Monday

Images: The Plough and The Harrow, after Millet, 1890, by Vincent Van Gigh

The Old Tower in The Fields, 1884, by Vincent Van Gogh

Public domain via wikiart.org