The harvest 

 

my mother and I stood in the soybean field beside her house 

in late September in the silence of the poem I had just read 

and watched the sun shift on the undersides of bean leaves 

and saw each other between the leaves, and after the sound 

of geese calling out to neighboring geese and before 

the crunch of late summer stalks on our way home I heard 

her sigh carry past the tree line, and over the spirits of our 

mothers and fathers, and it reverberated through the spirits 

of my children not yet born and the plates of our histories 

shifted under our feet, shifting earth where two earths met 

and uncrooking crooked bean rows and shaking from the 

many yellowing plants their tiny, reluctant seeds.