Academy of American Poets
View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kathryn Stripling Byer
Kathryn Stripling Byer
Kathryn Stripling Byer grew up in southwest Georgia, graduated from Wesleyan College...
More >
FURTHER READING
Poems about Landscapes
A lane of Yellow led the eye (1650)
by Emily Dickinson
A Story
by Philip Levine
At the Fishhouses
by Elizabeth Bishop
Balance
by Adam Zagajewski
For-The-Spirits-Who-Have-Rounded-The-Bend IIVAQSAAT
by dg nanouk okpik
from Crossing State Lines [Shirtsleeved afternoons]
by Rita Dove
Hovering at a Low Altitude
by Dahlia Ravikovitch
Inland
by Chase Twichell
Landscape With The Fall of Icarus
by William Carlos Williams
Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Pasture
by Robert Frost
The Philosopher in Florida
by C. Dale Young
This Lime Tree Bower My Prison
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Where I Live
by Maxine Kumin
Winter Morning
by William Jay Smith
Adopt a Poet | Add to Notebook | E-mail to Friend | Print
Coastal Plain  
by Kathryn Stripling Byer

The only clouds
forming are crow clouds,

the only shade, oaks
bound together in a tangle of oak

limbs that signal the wind
coming, if there is any wind

stroking the flat
fields, the flat

swatch of corn.
Far as anyone’s eye can see, corn’s

dying under the sky
that repeats itself either as sky

or as water
that won’t remain water

for long on the highway: its shimmer
is merely the shimmer

of one more illusion that yields
to our crossing as we ourselves yield

to our lives, to the roots
of our landscape. Pull up the roots

and what do we see but the night
soil of dream, the night

soil of what we call
home. Home that calls

and calls
and calls.




Share Digg StumbleUpon Facebook E-mail to Friend



Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from Coming to Rest by Kathryn Stripling Byer. Copyright © by Kathryn Stripling Byer.
Smaller TypeSmaller Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2012 by Academy of American Poets.