In the Harvest Season

Candlemas 2016Poetry
Written By Ryan Wilson

It’s finished. Waiting’s all that will remain.
The gossip now must go unverified.
Blue smoke from leaf-piles, smoldering like pride,
Hangs here, a ghost, a storm-cloud that can’t rain.
Last night, the county’s final weathervane
Fell in the high winds. Old roofs, stripped bare, preside.
Take down the tattered self you’ve crucified
And let the crows wing through the fields of grain.
The sagging fence will never stand up straight.
Whatever’s not ripe now will never be.
That pain tormenting you will not abate,
And in the windows of vacated banks
You’ll see yourself, passing by aimlessly.
You cannot change your life. Give up; give thanks.

Ryan Wilson

Ryan Wilson was born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1982, and raised in nearby Macon. His books include The Stranger World (Measure, 2017), winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, How to Think Like a Poet (Wiseblood, 2019), and Proteus Bound: Selected Translations 2008-20 (Franciscan UP, 2021). His work appears widely in periodicals such as Best American Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, First Things, Five Points, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, The Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review. Co-editor of the anthology, Contemporary Catholic Poetry (Paraclete, 2022), he is Editor-in-Chief of Literary Matters, and he teaches at The Catholic University of America and in the M.F.A. program at the University of St. Thomas—Houston.

Previous

Telecommunications
Next

Gazing into the Abyss