Mud Season
By Tess Taylor
We unstave the winter’s tangle.
Sad tomatoes, sullen sky.
We unplay the summer’s blight.
Rotted on the vine, black fruit
swings free of the strings that bound it.
In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields(,)
grotesque extruded peppers.
We prod half-thawed mucky things.
In the sky, starlings eddying.
Tomorrow, snow again, old silence.
Today, the creaking icy puller.
Last night I woke
to wild unfrozen prattle.
Rain on the roof— a foreign liquid tongue.
Copyright Credit: Tess Taylor, "Mud Season" from Work and Days. Copyright © 2016 by Tess Taylor. Reprinted by permission of Red Hen Press.
Source: Work and Days (Red Hen Press, 2016)