Harvest
A Shi Poem

Faces of millet, beards of wheat.
All is yellow, even the grass
And weeds that sprout among
These culvert roads. All is yellow.

The millet and wheat are poems;
Shadows that announce themselves
To fall. Barns, roads, remembrances.
Places long lost on some county map.

Here, a creek with braided shallows,
Here, a creek with olive waters.
Here, a creek separates millet wheat
From the rows of windbreak trees.

***

Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in California. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post-Corbett Foundation Award for Literature and a semi-finalist for the Emily Dickinson Society Award. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in Japan, Canada, Australia, Europe, Thailand, Hong Kong and India.