Home, poem by Bruce Weigl

HOME
by Bruce Weigl

I didn’t know I was grateful
            for such late-autumn
                        bent-up cornfields
 
yellow in the after-harvest
            sun before the
                        cold plow turns it all over
 
into never.
            I didn’t know
                        I would enter this music
 
that translates the world
            back into dirt fields
                        that have always called to me
 
as if I were a thing
            come from the dirt,
                        like a tuber,
 
or like a needful boy. End
            Lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
                         and unraveling strangeness. 

“Home” appears in Bruce Weigl’s collection The Unraveling Strangeness by Bruce Weigl, published by Grove/Atlantic. Copyright © 2003 by Bruce Weigl. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bruce Weigl served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 and was awarded a Bronze Star. His first full-length collection of poems was published in 1979. He has received two Pushcart Prizes, a Patterson Poetry Prize, and a Yaddo Foundation Fellowship. Weigl was awarded the Bread Loaf Fellowship in Poetry in 1981 and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988. He was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Song of Napalm.

Photo: “After the corn harvest” by Cindy Dietz, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED