Pastoral
The children are asleep in the fields and more silent than flowers. I tell you this in a tiny voice, my words closer together than the spaces between the beats of a hummingbird's heart. Is a once fertile phrase now heavy with vines and ivy? Is an ear filled with severed leaves? Are blades of grass just now snapping at the wind? I knew it would come to this. I knew it would come to this blue day with clouds moving quickly off, out over the pasture.
