Harvests Poem by Robert Rorabeck

You fell in love with another man,
Though broken before you touched that God.
I saw the fine virgins dancing in
The early mornings
Careful between the bluebells who
Saw us all,
Heads drooped and tearful
Bedecking the rest-stop on the highway.
Where I drove by ever so fast:
Defeated and sterile
North bound with the hammer down.
I could not rest.
The country was up in turmoil.
The ants boiled over the grass,
Eating the outstretched hand left unanswered
In the ditch.
The highjackers jumped the plane
Before it crashed....
Rich off the plunder they made vacant
Love to you on the roof of the carport
Outside your dorm room.
Where they landed
I never saw.
I never knew.
At night in the library
I floated past the moon.
In the womb of the mother
I kissed my Aristotelian shadow
And stole the words spoken by greater men
Who in different centuries serenaded your mothers.
At dawn,
The moose with the cadmium antlers
Trumpeted for sex
Before it click-clacked its extinction-
Annexed, I crawled back to your concrete lap,
But from that terrace your lips were bruised
From heavy petting-
Exhausted from thwarted attempts
At impregnation,
You would not let me in.
You sighed, “Go away, my love.
Go away.”
You had sated on the fruit of strangely
Insignificant men....
And in no time at all,
I would leave you as you took their name.
Expelled,
You did not look back.
Rather, upwards your eyes lingered
As your long forgotten sisters
Curtsied demurely in the farmer’s
Unplowed field.