Cross-Post: "At a Matinal Hour"
An on-theme poem from The Enthusiast
This poem, by yours truly, about the threshing season was originally published in The Enthusiast, the Substack magazine of which I’m EIC. Here at the height of summer, it seems like a fun departure from the normal fare on Classical Roots. If you’re interested in more content like this, click the link below:
“Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear...”
—Czeslaw Milosz
The wind shifted to the north,
Passing cool benedictions
Over the whole Cape
After stifling weeks.
Dreamy and clean,
We walked through
The just-threshed fields,
Heaped and dewy and drying
Under the smooth belly
Of the light. It’s for hours
Like these that we possess
A word like holiness,
As if the only human role
Were to witness the
Blue aspersions
Of swallows in flight,
Or to testify to the sourdough
Tang of slashed grass
Waiting for some great power
To lift and truss and loft it,
But not now. Not yet.
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