Today's poem is by Rebecca Foust

The Golden Country
        a landscape I've seen sometimes in a dream
        —1984

In the North Country everything familiar
will be strange, & everything strange
will be strangely familiar.

The sea will be fresh, not salt. The sun
will be a pale, blind coin & the air
will stiffen with stays of frost.

The lake will be lost in sea smoke
moaned by low foghorn chords.
Later, its ice will stack blue in blocks

on the shore. Days will be bone-cold,
short & dark till June, when serviceberry
will bloom to signal thaw in the earth

& time to bury the dead. Soon, berries
in branches & blue in bogs wide as sky.
Then, pie & good, dense bread.

We'll swim in water the color of pewter
& blood, & find agates banded eyewithin-
eye. Somehow, this will be why

we had come. Somehow, this will be
our authentic life, meaning maybe
we chose being over being martyrs.

A place that is liminal will call you
to cross over, & in the wilderness,
we will die out of our old lives

so we can live in a cedar-log room,
drinking from a pump worked by hand
behind yellow bloom.

To get to the petroglyph, we will
portage twice & paddle all morning,
our bow plowing an acre

of white paper stars. We'll see
etched red on the cliff face a wolf,
a moose, & three faint canoes.

We'll come home sunburned & bitten
& tired & happy & that night will sleep
with our limbs entwined.

I'll dream of light, only light—pink,
purple & green—pulsing the sky
alive. I'll see in the Northern Lights

what the Ojibwe see: the dead, dancing
—I will see us—& will wake up
shouting your name.

We'll be in the cabin, every window
thrown open to birdsong & being,
everything else held at bay:

the burning earth, the State,
the suffering State, our own suffering
in the Ministry of Love,

& we'll begin to remember again
with our bodies how it feels to live
as a child can live—& maybe—to thrive.

First published under the title "Northern Lights" in The Southern Review, Autumn 2024.

Copyright © 2025 Rebecca Foust All rights reserved
from You Are Leaving the American Sector
Backbone Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission