The Unmown Field

Fifteen years and even I

who watched every season

of its changing can no longer

remember the field

that’s grown over.

Sheltered by snow-toppled

grasses, the green shoots

of trees hardened,

and by the first June

red cedars tongued

the air above bluestem.

Nothing lasts. Not the field,

not my girlhood, not the baby

I carried until the next came

behind him. Now my daughter

is the one who is young,

and already too heavy

to carry. Doves croon

to her from new pines

as they did from the pines

of my childhood. The sorrow

in their song is the sorrow

of the human listener,

old sorrow that somehow

I knew even then.