A Tidings of Magpies

by Joyce Sutphen That is not the country for poetry. It has no mountains, its flowers are plain and never poisonous, its gardens are packed into blue mason jars. There are no hedges bordering the roads, the sky flies up from the ditches, loose in every direction. Yet I knew it to be passionate, even in its low rolling hills, where a red tractor pushed through the oat field, cutting down gold straw and beating a stream of grain into the wagon trailing behind in the stubble, I knew it to be melodious in its birch woods, leaves shadowing a stone-strewn river, the path along the bank softened with pine needles, sunlight woven in and out of branches, the many colors of green, solid as a pipe organ's opening chord, I knew it would haunt the memory with its single elm, where a herd of cows found shade in the July heat, their bony tails swinging the tufted bristle left and right over the high ledge of a hip bone, while at the hori...