Stone Fields with First Snow
Out of my past flew a crow,
its wing broken, its wing blue-black as ink
that wrote the dreams it wove from the stones
and rolled their code in the mud.
When the crow slept on the ground, it came to love
the rock that was its bed, the stone that was
its head, the sky hung upside down over the field,
and the rivers that bent their way toward a hollow moon.
I first saw the fields in a dun-brown cloud, the early winter
like a sleep that had come over me, my eyes certain
that all was ocean, roughed by storm. But later, I saw the stones
had heaped themselves like gods across the land. A crow
with a broken wing standing at the road, watching us
as we walked the fields, as we poked the frost with our boots.
We could live here, I thought. This broken earth.
This land of hard hard rock. We could plant and make things soft
or come to ruin, right here. The crow hopped on
its singular path down the road past the barrens.
Where the back is broken, love can grow. Where the land
is broken, the cold comes and makes of it a coat.
its wing broken, its wing blue-black as ink
that wrote the dreams it wove from the stones
and rolled their code in the mud.
When the crow slept on the ground, it came to love
the rock that was its bed, the stone that was
its head, the sky hung upside down over the field,
and the rivers that bent their way toward a hollow moon.
I first saw the fields in a dun-brown cloud, the early winter
like a sleep that had come over me, my eyes certain
that all was ocean, roughed by storm. But later, I saw the stones
had heaped themselves like gods across the land. A crow
with a broken wing standing at the road, watching us
as we walked the fields, as we poked the frost with our boots.
We could live here, I thought. This broken earth.
This land of hard hard rock. We could plant and make things soft
or come to ruin, right here. The crow hopped on
its singular path down the road past the barrens.
Where the back is broken, love can grow. Where the land
is broken, the cold comes and makes of it a coat.
November / December, 2022
Meghan Sterling’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Nelle, Colorado Review, Poetry South, and many others, and has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes. Her debut poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books), came out in 2021 and was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize in Poetry. Her chapbook, Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) her collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and her collection, View from a Borrowed Field, which won Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize, are forthcoming in 2023.
Art: Japanese Garden. Oil on canvas. T. Aguilera.