Scenes Along a Country Road, Late Summer
Just look! The trees, brazen
with summer’s lovemaking. Entirely
unabashed. And the cabbage. The cabbage!
Voluptuous wave on voluptuous wave.
And across the field, a ghost ship of a barn,
so derelict, so lopsided by time it should by now
have capsized & sunk, instead seems to
float on those brassica breakers, all the late-season purples
billowing its stubborn hull toward me, another age’s
relic, like the face of someone who
loved me once, here again
to remind me
how green I was
& tender
as a late-planted seedling
striving toward the August sun,
believing the splendor would last.
ELIZABETH JOHNSTON AMBROSE’s writing appears in The Atlantic, Rattle, McSweeney’s, Emrys, and the collection Nasty Women Poets, among others. Read more.