The Corn Baby

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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.

© Mark Wunderlich