Harvest Crew

Harvest Crew

Nights, we don't talk much.
Those with beds take
some measure of sleep, their hands 
hardening in the cold dark air,

ears stopped against 
the wind's consistent negations 
except for those moments 
in the ordinal hours 

when some bird, alarmed 
by nightmare or predation, 
comes to knowledge of itself 
beyond the scope of its small 

and fine-boned imagination, 
sending out its call brief 
but recognizable, sudden, 
aloft, across the fields–

we wait for that, 
hope's music or something 
like it, what trains the ear
to hear in day. 

Volume 26, no. 2, 1998

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021); and The Opening Ritual (Tupelo, 2024). Recent work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Yale Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University.