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The Corn Baby

By Mark Wunderlich b. 1968 Mark Wunderlich

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.

Source: Poetry (March 2009).

Biography

Mark Wunderlich’s collections of poetry include The Anchorage (1999), winner of the Lambda Literary Award, and Voluntary Servitude (2004). As J.D. McClatchy said of Wunderlich’s debut, “The Anchorage bravely takes up the raw mess of desire and pain, the cold ache of longing and loss, and in sleek and searing poems exposes the way we live now to the larger powers of the racing heart and the radiant imagination.” Wunderlich’s . . .

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