This is an old one, but I just had to repost it! The Yankees and the White Sox are playing the first ever Major League Baseball game in my home state tonight, at the Field of Dreams. I don't follow sports but I'm watching the game with the family (a rarity in itself), and it's difficult not to feel nostalgic for home.
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Iowa Fields
to Epicurus
I saw Ilium gleam
As her walls, in a dream,
Watched her sons return home on their shields--
Saw the marching Greek host
In the corn, and the coast
Of Asia in
Iowa fields.
The philosophers spoke
In the shade of the oak
As the willows and cottonwoods reeled
In an October gale
Blowing hearty and hale,
Pages flipping in
Iowa fields
And I wrote out your name
On the face of the stream,
Writ in water but never repealed--
Made your garden to bloom
Like the yucca, festooned;
Flowering lonely in
Iowa fields.
And your precepts I pressed
Like a stamp to my chest--
And a ring on my finger revealed
Where your likeness was cast
And a voice from the past
Rose up godlike in
Iowa fields.
I hoped to see thee again
By the feld or the fen
When the bells of the Twentieth pealed.
But--alas! lies my ring
At the end of all things
In a grave beneath
Iowa fields.