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Calvin Luther Martin

 (Summer 1994)

The road comes up from the river and runs away through fields of
 clover and grass. Growing daisy and buttercup like any old hayfield
—I faithfully visit each summer to smell and feel such joy. This
 being its sole concern. And now is mine. I have come to join
 creation performing itself in beauty.

Here, surrounded, is my favorite place to run.

I run for this only—for praise, not to pace off space. To fill in-sucking lungs with 
pungency, the sweetness and musk, heat and summer brightness of this 
place.

I run to feed the silent furnace by my salt and sweat, 
brushing air’s low vapors. Watching wind move fields and me, in the soul, in shapes and patterns as rain does water. There is utter joy
 moving here.

I run for meadowlark and bobolink hatched, fledged, singing these 
very fields. Praise to prairie things in tongues born of that holy 
grass. Hearing its own voice grown.

My own breathes only, till I
 reach the line of trees to say only how they are so beautiful.