One With The Sun

By A. F. Moritz b. 1947

Child

one with the sun

in trackless fields

of yellow grass and thistle, scent

of humid heavy air and the wing music

of bees and flies.

Child, slender

nakedness to itself unknown,

true colour of the light

dispersed invisibly

or glowing around the black hulls

of distant thunderheads, around

the grasshopper’s countenance,

solemn, vigilant and wise.

Green apples, poured full

of density, of crispness, float unmoved

under leaves on the slope. Brown

fallen apples nest

in secret whorls of grass. The apple tree:

alone in so much space. And below

in the woods by the water

a sweet dead branch

cracks lightly

in the shadow in the wind.

But here is an old track

through the grass head-high

to a child: who

made it? They must have

passed and passed by this one tree,

by the abandoned, tireless car

where rabbits peer out, and the circle

of black embers,

cans, springs, skeletons

of furniture. They too

passed here many times

on their way from the street’s end

to the oaks that screen

the river. There

the sun is nesting now, night

rises with pale flutterings

of white wings from roots

of plants and the black water.

Source: Mahoning (Brick Books, 1994)

Biography

A.F. Moritz (Albert F. Moritz) is the author of more than 15 books of poetry; he has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Relit Award (for Night Street Repairs, named the best book of poetry published in Canada in 2005), an Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. A Canadian citizen, Moritz was born in Ohio and moved to Canada in . . .

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