MEADOWLARK COUNTRY
            Amy Clampitt
                p. 1990
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Speaking of the skylark in a New England classroom--
nonbird, upward-twirler, Old-World hyperbole--
I thought how the likewise ground-nesting
Western meadowlark, rather than soar unsupported
out over the cattle range at daybreak, takes up 
its post on a fencepost. I heard them out there, 
once, by the hundreds, one after another: 
a liquid millennium arising from the still 
eastward-looking venue of the dark--

like the still-evolving venue of the young, the faces 
eastward-looking, bright with a mute, 
estranged, ancestral puzzlement.


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