Excerpt
From What a Kingdom It Was 1960
First Song
Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy After an afternoon of carting dung Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall And he began to hear the pond frogs all Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.
Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall Of Illinois, and from the fields two small Boys came bearing cornstalk violins And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins And the three sat there scraping of their joy.
It was now fine music the frogs and the boys Did in the towering Illinois twilight make And into dark in spite of a shoulders ache A boys hunched body loved out of a stalk The first song of his happiness, and the song woke His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
Copyright © 2000, 2001 by Galway Kinnell