For Another Harvest Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The cloyness that I overuse is here,
And you are now asleep Alma, just as brown and as
Delicious as a caramel apple in a medieval fair,
Or a penny in a wishing well:
But there is still that witchcraft sealed in your
Brown eyes:
Sealed with the brown feathers that you lid your genies:
And you want things,
And these things come to you through hard work:
And the lights stay on, but you have to pay a little:
You tell me that you have never crested mountains:
That you are not close to your sister,
And that your man tells you that he can find a better woman
On the next street corner;
But I am just right here, collecting the dollar bills,
Looking at you the way the doe looks
At the stamp of a most solemn forest, knowing that footpaths
It has made towards the heart and the
Hidden springs:
And maybe my son will have changed from prince into
A spry animal,
But like him and the other words that I cannot control,
I do now own you, and yet I am right here,
Still guarding the fire hydrants, and making them burn under
The collect hopes of the sun:
And I watch you turn around, a hundred bounds of sincere
Daylight,
As brown as the joys of the blowing wind who whistles ferally
Over the virile and auburn clips of all the land
Who waits in its yawning bed
For another harvest.