Crop Circles

Contributor: Anne Higgins

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"Early in my writing career I came to believe that the stories I wrote were already written in the unconscious by a hand other than my own."
- James Lee Burke


Geometry was my worst subject,
but I love it slicing its way through the cornfield.
Flowers, Mandalas, Pentagrams,
twelve years now, each summer
new theorems.
Snowflakes, insects,
quilt squares,
Who speaks here?
What message whistles
in the high corn?
In the wheat, what coded words
have I been ignoring?
The cure is part of the art,
the unfolding of the origami of pain.
At the approach of the reaper,
sheaves bow down like Joseph's dream,
not cut,
but bent.


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Anne Higgins teaches English at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg Maryland. She has five books and two chapbooks of poetry published.