David W. Landrum

Bluffton, Ohio

We saw the fields, heavy before the frost
had settled in, watched as the squares of grain
were cut down — chopped away, garnered and lost.

You met me in the Ohio champaign,
flat land to the horizons, vistas long;
what we both felt came fully and came strong
that autumn, in those cool October days
out on that featureless Midwestern plain
of Amish farms preserving the arcane
methods of husbandry and the old ways,
set on the land, spare, placid, unadorned.

Like grain grown up after the rain and sun,
we sensed our fullness, till it was suborned —
like fields, tawny with stubble, harvest done.

[Stefanile sonnet ]