the one where Amy doesn't rant about feminism or politics

Several close friends know that my poetry workshop has been one of the highlights of my semester and has opened up a wonderful new world of both other people's work and my own (admittedly thin and probably embryonic). Occasionally I will have to indulge in a flight of personal journal fancy, and write up a particularly affecting poem the instant I read it. Hence, Vernacular by Morri Creech:

And when he listened
it was like the wind that rinses the first bird-notes from the larch trees
winnows the pollen from leaf-down
sows witchgrass and thistle
that harrows the surface of the waters
that in summer is the lush fever of mosquitoes and rivershine
and in winter snags the ribs of scattered leaves,
that plays the low notes of the locust wing
and, formless itself, imposes
upon the forms of limestone and hollowed reeds;
that unravels its story
to the acres of fenceline and pasture,
to the sun-cluttered joists and rafters of bankrupt churches,
that in childhood is sweetness
at the tops of sycamores
and in adulthood the rememberance of sweetness
amid the dry sheaves
and the one cardinal's feather splayed in the field,
that swells to a consummate music
and contracts to a held breath
that is balm of the honeysuckle
balm of clover and mint,
that stirs bees from their hives
and wasps from their paper cathedrals
that forges its burnished imprint on the river,
that sculpts an absence
sculpts the one syllable held in the dumb mouths of statues
that raises only its own name
praises its own dust
and hastens towards the silence of its own beginnings.