Harvest Economy
by Taylor Graham
Taylor Graham

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. His poems have appeared in International Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and he's included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). His book "The Downstairs Dance Floor" (Texas Review Press, 2006) was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.

Yankee hardpan, stone
two feet deep in places, and
where's the soft spot
in between, the giving soil

between plough-blade and granite,
where some crop could
shoulder through? How
believe in the colt springing

from plough-mare flanks, the lamb
from ewe starved on gravel?
Somewhere between Bible
script and Sunday sermon,

between thrift and a child's
imaginings — just
look, the Harvest Moon stares
down. Labor late

into the night, it says. This
unspent light. Look up
and love this wonder of a sky
not paid for, just given.

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