Today's poem is by Bethany Schultz Hurst

Field and Glory
       

First this country was an infant. Then it cut its teeth
on anything it could fit into its mouth. Can we pretend
that it's a protest, not watching its fireworks up close?
This morning we were at the fairgrounds, though, in line

with giant slushies, paying to paint the children's faces
into whiskered cats. Now we've retreated to the hillside
by the potato field with the view we thought was secret

until a series of arriving cars spit out gravel in the mud.
Out climb teenage girls, all poofed hair and prairie dresses,
like someone's fantasy pioneer. You'll see them
sometimes, the polygamists, skirting in from the edge

of town. Some man has imagined such plenty to be
ordained. Imagined his seed should be as innumerable
as the stars. They've come here to see the spectacle

without being spectacles themselves, the way
they grocery shop late at night when the aisles are empty
but for their listing carts. I've seen them, trailing
children, interrupting the stocked shelves' easy promise

of anything we could want. On the dark hill,
parked machinery looms behind us. In the waning light
my daughter's face is a confusing smudge, but

she's not done imagining she's an animal. You could
pretend this newborn road was carved just so we could see
the valley spilling out before us. But the excavator
will keep at the dirt until the field gives way

to a thousand costly homes. I keep trying to better see
the girls, who have spread out into the field, bowing
now and then to press their faces to the crops

as if they'd wandered into some fragrant garden
instead of sprayed and irrigated rows. My daughter
is at first uneasy when the city bursts at last into smoke
and glimmer. We lose sight of anything but sky. We pretend

the bursting lights are fountains, fast-blooming roses,
collapsing domes of huge cathedrals. Full skirts
we could wear or sprawl beneath. Who wouldn't want

to lie beneath a flamboyant tree and be carried skyward
by its blossoms. To see a seed festoon its ridiculous beauty
across the dark field of sky. To watch with open mouths
as the starry darkness is devoured.

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Copyright © 2023 Bethany Schultz Hurst All rights reserved
from Blueprint and Ruin
Southern Indiana Review Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission