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  • 
    • May 2013

    David Caplan, Linda Gregerson, Derek Sheffield, A. E. Stallings, Michelle Boisseau, Peter Cole, and more.

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The land is full of what was lost. What's hidden

Rises to the surface after rain

In new-ploughed fields, and fields stubbled again:

The clay shards, foot and lip, that heaped the midden,

And here and there a blade or flakes of blade,

A patient art, knapped from a core of flint,

Most broken, few as coins new from the mint,

Perfect, shot through time as through a glade.

You cannot help but think how they were lost:

The quarry, fletched shaft in its flank, the blood

Whose trail soon vanished in the antlered wood,

Not just the meat, but what the weapon cost—

O hapless hunter, though your aim was true—

The wounded hart, spooked, fleeting in its fear—

And the sharpness honed with longing, year by year

Buried deeper, found someday, but not by you.

Source: Poetry (May 2002).

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MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

This poem originally appeared in the May 2002 issue of Poetry magazine

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• May 2002 Table of Contents
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More about this poem

Biography

A. E. (Alicia) Stallings studied classics in Athens, Georgia and has lived since 1999 in Athens, Greece. She has published three books of poetry, Archaic Smile (1999), which won the Richard Wilbur Award; Hapax (2000); and Olives (2012). Her new verse translation of Lucretius (in rhyming fourteeners!), The Nature of Things, is published by Penguin Classics. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and . . .

Continue reading this biography

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Poems by A. E. Stallings

• Actaeon
• After a Greek Proverb
• Another Lullaby for Insomniacs
• Blackbird Etude
• Containment

• More poems by A. E. Stallings (24 poems)
  • Epic Simile
  • Extinction of Silence
  • Failure
  • Fairy-tale Logic
  • Fear of Happiness
  • First Miracle
  • Fishing
  • Implements from the “Tomb of the Poet”
  • Momentary
  • Recitative
  • Sestina: Like
  • Sublunary
  • The Catch
  • The Mother’s Loathing of Balloons
  • The Rosehead Nail
  • Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther
  • Tulips
  • Two Violins
  • Written on the eve of my 20th high school reunion, which I was not able to attend

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Poem Categorization

SUBJECT Time & Brevity, Nature, Living, Landscapes & Pastorals

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Video

• The Catch

Articles

• Eight Takes: Fenton, Strand, Hopler, Zukofsky, Stallings, Voigt, Kinnell, Wojahn by Peter Campion
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• The Poem as Comic Strip #6 by By R. Kikuo Johnson and A.E. Stallings

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