Foundling
for a sixty-seven-pound nugget of Lake Superior copper found in an Iowa cornfield Before the earliest flute was carved from a vulture’s wing, before we—what few we were— bowed to the moon, the balmy, secular night, you were coming. Snug in the great throat of a glacier. Still as a wish, until its sighing end. I like to think you waited years for us, one shoulder greening in the damp, the other burnished by long leaves of wheat, before we called it wheat. Or was it loess, the wind’s fine veil, polished you so bright we would know you at first sight? What have you seen in the ice and the earth? Is hell cold, or hot? Do you pray, too? And to what god? Or whale, or bigger rock?
Copyright © 2017 by Megan Levad. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.