It was in the harvest time,
when the lever gave
and the dam spilled over the grasses
and the seeds were not fresh to be planted
and the shoots were drowned in the rush
and the farmers’ daughters
went out to the harvest
and we the naked harvestless
ate of the bugs in the mud,
drank of the brown in the flood.
Your bellies, said the girls,
you are bloating your bellies with water.
It was not the sun we wanted covered;
not the sun whose covering
and uncovering
we wanted and feared.
It was the women in the field.
That and the thirst.
– Netanel Schwartz is a senior in Timothy Dwight College.