Iowa is green with summer.
There was a thunderstorm yesterday.
When dusk comes, the fireflies will all come out.
Now it is supper-time.
The farm-wife stands on the back-porch.
She rings a little, silver bell.
In a far-off field, her young son lies on his back.
He is drowsy and half-dreaming.
An open book has fallen from his hands to the earth.
II.
The poet said she was young and beautiful,
in a green field, when she wandered far away from her mother
to pick purple flowers, fragrant with springtime.
She pulled a beautiful one up by its roots
and a horse’s head emerged after it, then a chariot,
as she stumbled back from the pit opening before her feet.
A dark king stood in the chariot—
he seized her by the hair and dragged her away,
underground, where she could barely breathe.
The flower-girl wandered aimlessly for years, listening
to her mother weeping in her dreams,
sitting by dark rivers, always thirsty.
If ever she escaped the darkness, it seemed
she was always dragged back again in winter,
and she forgot again the sunlit upper-world.
One day, a white woman crossed the Acheron—
she’d been bitten by a snake on the heel,
and she’d died on her wedding day.
Her memories of light were faint,
but in her dreams she heard the singing
and the harp of her distant husband.
The flower-girl and the white woman held hands in the dark
and told one another not to be afraid. They fed one another
the pomegranate seeds of forgotten joy.
III.
The poet rests his face in his hands.
(This was a long time ago.)
The book is finished, but who will read it?
He is tired and does not think
he can pray. If he prays, his prayer
has no words.
His heart beats in rhythm to the memory
of a psalm he read in translation:
all my fountains are in you.
Jane Beal
Sunflower Songs (2012)
THE POETRY PLACE 
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