Conception Poem / Another Word for Rain.
by Donna Kane

Tonight there is nothing so still
as the red seed drill stopped at the edge of the field.
Lined with grain, the turned earth sinks into itself, a body filled
with someone else's wishes. When she moves against him,
he thinks he is dreaming of rain, her mouth on his skin,
she tastes the clay, cell by cell, that's furrowed its way inside him.
In a land that will hold them all their lives, I stir
the way leopard frogs, dormant beneath the tilled rows,
stir to the tremble of earth, a barley seed's memory of light.