Daye Phillippo: “Green Corn”
GREEN CORN
Born in a small city in the Midwest, streets
in orderly rows, surrounded by cornfields
in orderly rows, seeds planted using seed drills,
uniform depth and distance apart, “better”
than broadcasting by hand, inefficient practice,
riddled with uncertainty—birds and voles, wind.
Born to rows, order and predictability seemed
reasonable enough to expect. Silly me.
Green corn, creaking as it shoots up after rain
and heat, rain and heat, monoculture, yes,
but field of dreams, serendipitous. Rapid change
—combed brown fields to green sprouts, then
discrete blades to thick green walls, rustling.
Driving home one July, after two weeks away
the corn had grown so tall that I drove past
our gravel road without recognizing it at all.
The corn had stayed, kept on doing what it was
called to do. I was the one who’d gone away.
Daye Phillippo taught English at Purdue University and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Presence, Cider Press Review, Twelve Mile Review, One Art, Shenandoah, The Windhover, and many others. She lives and writes in rural Indiana where she hosts a monthly Poetry Hour at her local library. Thunderhead (Slant, 2020) was her debut full-length collection.