Summer Prayer

and another short Summer Produce Series poem

A vacation with my family warranted a short hiatus from poetry, which meant some neglect on my part to

Claire

and I’s Summer Produce Series. All good things (periods of rest being one of them) come to an end and now I must catch up with the two prompts I failed to share poems for—corn and watermelon.

There’s so much I could say about corn (the state I live in is literally known for it). Yet, all I could come up with was this prayer-like poem that I had originally (semi)recorded as an audio file on my phone while I drove by—you guessed it—fields upon fields of corn. It’s a little corny (pun intended), but the sentiments in it are true nonetheless.

Then, there’s a very short watermelon piece. Here, I use brevity to my advantage in order to help me better communicate the poem’s theme (hence the title).

Let me know in the comments which poem resonated with you the most and why!

Happy Reading!

Summer Prayer

Out on the flat farmlands of Ohio 
(where corn is all the gold pioneers ever found) 

the old adage goes, 
that in the stillness of twilight

if you press your ear close enough to the earth
you’ll hear the popping and cracking of growth

And I guess what I’m trying to say, 
is that I want to be like a cornstalk

growing at such speed that others can hear 
my heart extending upward, heaven-bound, 

expanding outward, like a hug, close enough
to feed kernels of kindness to those I love

   - r.e.g.

---

Haste

I never know where to slice a watermelon first, 
how to cut through its thick rind just right
and get the most out of its meaty insides 
how to make sure I lose as little 
of the juicy sweetness as possible 

yet often I butcher the skin,
pieces of pink flesh going with it
cutting mercilessly, water like blood on my hands 
dropping down to drip from my elbows, realizing later
than I should have, that there is now less life left to enjoy 

   - r.e.g.