Now let’s look at
a field
in fall:
half living,
half leaving,
half outward,
half injured
quartered
section
of parceled
land
legally sub-
divided
as playground
felled
to basic firmament.
Or
you just tell those
other
kids
no,
that
“black
is
beautiful”
warble
our parents
with worse-worn
worn-out
words.
But from here,
face to floor,
we see the molecular
sophistry of soil,
the or
of orthic
the no
of chernozem
the black
of dark brown
children
flat out,
face to ground.
Can we ‘semble
this out?
A field is
just the fist side
of a fact
caught out
of season
and
found out in
words
and
in-
jured
and
we swore we
would stop looking
at fields
because they remind
us so much
of absence
of beauty
it hurts.
Bertrand Bickersteth’s first book of poems, The Response of Weeds (2020), won the Gerald Lampert Award. He lives in Calgary.
