Issue 21 | Winter 2019

Sweet Rye & Timothy

You imagine that you’ve learned all there is to
    know about
         death now that he’s been
                 lowered into the ground & his small plot of earth is
         blessed for eons to come, but, in a fenced pasture on the far
side of the church cemetery, a farmer
    has sown an
         acre or two in
                 rye & sweet timothy, a heavenly fragrance, his
         daughter’s aged pony’s enduring love beyond that one love
he has each day for the young girl, his mistress.
    You think now
         how the one who’s been
                 buried beneath still yearns to reach out & somehow be-
         come the green slurry, that chewed pulp dripping from the pony’s maw.
If you are still standing there at the gravesite
    thinking that
         you know every-
                 thing there is to know about death, look to the sky above,
         now heaven’s color or what you once believed heaven must be.

Filed under: Poetry

Terry Savoie

Terry Savoie has had nearly four hundred poems published in journals here and abroad over the past four decades. These include APR, Ploughshares, Tar River, The Iowa Review, Commonweal and North American Review as well as recent or forthcoming issues of The American Journal of Poetry, One, Bluestem, Cortland Review, Chiron Review and Birmingham Poetry Review, among others. His chapbook, Reading Sunday, won the Bright Hill Competition and was published in the spring of 2018.