Poppies

This is a year of poppies: our land was brimming with them as May burned into June and I returned— a sweet dark wine that made me drunk. From clouds of mulberry to grains to grasses ripeness was all, in the fitting heat, in the slow drowsiness spreading through the universe of green. My life half over I saw grown sons setting off alone and vanishing from sight beyond the prison the flight of the swallow makes in the spent glow of a stormy evening, but the pain gave way humanely to the light coming on inside the house for another meal in air made cooler by hail letting off steam in the distance.