When sun, light handed, sows this Indian water With a crop of cockles, The vines arrange their tender shadows In the sweet leafage of an artificial France. Awake, in the frames of windows, innocent children, Loving the blue, sprayed leaves of childish life, Applaud the bearded corn, the bleeding grape, And cry: "Here is the hay-colored sun, our marvelous cousin, Walking in the barley, Turning the harrowed earth to growing bread, And splicing the sweet, wounded vine. Lift up your hitch-hiking heads And no more fear the fever, You fugitives, and sleepers in the fields, Here is the hay-colored sun!" And when their shining voices, clean as summer, Play, like churchbells over the field, A hundred dusty Luthers rise from the dead, unheeding, Search the horizon for the gap-toothed grin of factories, And grope, in the green wheat, Toward the wood winds of the western freight.
From In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems ©2005. Reprinted with permission of New Directions Publishing.