"Preamble" by Keith Harvey

Preamble


Spring shifts into his summer,
one year after He expelled them from their garden,
theirs because it was theirs to name and define.
Now, he sits on the edge of the cornfield
dressed in his crow feathers,
listening to the wind rustling among the dried leaves,
mice seeking desiccated kernels among the weeds.
She tells his first-born, marked by a scar
that pulses blood red in the sun that he is an agrarian
and that the cornfield is his and in her magic thinking,
she thinks to sacrifice the corn to Him, as a way back.
She holds the past in her cupped hands and the son drinks from it,
all of her memories of her green days naked in the garden.
He, however, has another plan, a quest that seeks the future
and a voyage to unknown locales and deeper depths.
For this trip he needs a song and a mode of discourse.
So he begins to chant and rock back and forth,
hoping to transcend the sand of the cornfield and the past.
She hearing him hears only the caw of the crow and she frowns
and drowns out his moaning call with her song of the glories of the past.