The Corn Baby

They brought it. It was brought from the field, the last sheaf, the last bundle the latest and most final armful. Up up over the head, hold it, hold it high it held the gazer’s gaze, it held hope, did hold it. Through the stubble of September, on shoulders aloft, hardly anything, it weighed, like a sparrow, it was said, something winged, hollow, though pulsing, freed from the field where it flailed in wind, where it waited, wanted to be found and bound with cord. It had limbs, it had legs. And hands. It had fingers. Fingers and a face peering from the stalks, shuttered in the grain, closed, though just a kernel a shut corm. They brought him and autumn rushed in, tossed its cape of starlings, tattered the frost-spackled field.