Poetry Month Day 5

A prompt feels like an invitation to explore something, like a tasting for the mind … it’s National Poetry Month, with its poem-a-day challenges, and I’m following as long as I can.

Yesterday I looked back to the summer I left the newsroom … the day before, remembered those late nigts at my desk, and today I’m looking ahead to this summer — Prompts: 30/30 “Passing lane”
NaPoWriMo: Heirloom seeds or vegetables. The names of these kinds of maize, some of them very rare, I found at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

Kulli black Incan corn
steeps in deep purple water.
Cheqche-Peskoruntu
kernels mottled like birds’ eggs

Chuspi Puka Llanqha
with the tint of raspberry juice,
butter and slate, is ground
into sweet, tender meal

and Karu Kau Suni,
long orange-red kernels
creased and tipped in cream
toasted and eaten warm …

Peskoruntu yellow
streaked in mist and black
like a batik shadow
of men against the sunset …

gardeners who set cobs
in these northern climbs
will pollinate by hand
and save a measure of seed

as the people who bred them
have conceived generation
after generation, passing
one step at a time

by hand from one small plot
to another, until a few
cross over the high valleys.
Some grown in the mountains

are sensitive to light
and here will only tassle
in cooling late September
when the nights outlast the days.

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