Poetry

Poems from GOD OF CORN

Each poem begins with a title, and in most cases a passage, from Josiah Gilbert Holland’s 1855 multi-volume book A History of Western Massachusetts. 

If Mercy Prevent Not, of the Same Bitter Cup

Even the clouds, which are nothing, which mean
nothing at all,
are passing us by
into their wars,
their humidity. Forget everything I have been saying.
Forget it all.
Pay me no mind. Pay me
nothing. The last
thing I should want after these years among the fruits,
the sugars, the glass
dancing in the boiling water,
is to be paid. 

In 1703

In 1703, the settlers, moved by the fact that they were in danger of overflows, petitioned for the privilege of moving back from the river, and building on the hill, half a mile Eastward. Their prayer was granted, and the town voted to give them ‘the land from Pecowsic Brook to Enfield bounds, and from the hill Eastward of Long Meadow, half a mile further Eastward into the woods.’

There is a boy who drowned in the river.
There was a boy.
The river
every spring fills and the marsh grows
into the forest, echoing
its faint current among the trunks.
The boy launched himself on a plank boat. We watched
his leaving,
saw him try the brown flood,
the ropes, the reed fires and wet.
There is no story to tell, he was hunting the turtles
which were waking
early from an early spring, strange
on the tongue but good.
His mother cried
and his father
but no one could say he was wrong to try. Every year
the river floods, and
every year we hunt turtles.
They stud the washed-out logs
with their honest frowns, their old-shoe
serenity. They are a kind
of pity, an under-abundance of everything we want them to have—
tumorous non-flowers,
exhausted in their rest.
The days lengthen.
I write letters to my own father
and for his heartbreak at missing me he leaves them sealed
as though I were not
alive here to send them. 

David Troupes