Amid The Steady Green
In the stick and death of August
my grandmother hides in the corn.
Rustling through the deep stalks,
she takes from them full yellow ears.
I glimpse her dress and white, bunned hair
here and there amid the steady green.
She comes from the garden, bent with a sack
full of corn, into the open haze of evening.
She touches with her free hand the dusky air
as if she were passing into another world.
— Matt Collinsworth
Crow’s Nest
From cast-off plywood, two-by-fours,
Scraps of any kind of lumber,
Each summer we built rafts to float
Like Huck and Jim on the river
But never got one there. We knew
With every hammer stroke we’d keep
The finished rafts in yard or field,
Drifting as the grass around grew deep,
Shooting the rapids of August.
We made them into play forts later,
Into bridges over narrow creeks–
As close as they would come to water.
In only one did we take off,
The one we hoisted like an anchor
Up a tree and made our crow’s nest
In the full sails and Jolly Roger
Of the leaves. Riding the swelled air,
Lookouts for all we couldn’t see
Before, we were high and dry and still
Not run aground on what would be.
— James Scruton
First appeared in POETRY magazine. Copyright 1996 The Modern Poetry Association. Reprinted with permission.
