We come into dusk
on roads narrowed by briar,
dewberries firing red
and purple musk in heat.
Which cow looks round with calf,
which old roof sags—
This is how we spin words
around our gold-ringed
fingers like wild rye,
stiff, yet soft inside.
So often the sermon of sabbath
is just a plain day gone by,
acres of corn in the bottoms,
car slowed to a moon’s crawl,
below sheaves gravel-dusted
as ghosts. Unfazed in the field:
a maze of husks, rustling and amening.

---

Sharon Ackerman resides in Virginia. Her poems have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Appalachian Places, Kestrel, Salvation South, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and others. Her third poetry collection is Sweeping the Porch (Pine Row).

 

 
Image: Joshua Michaels. Unsplash, 2020.