Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper
Poem, Found in the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture Weekly Market Bulletin
June 28
Ground saturated with water. Some
thunderstorms and wind have lodged
lots of hayland. Frost damage
in isolated pockets. From
Strafford, word of leaf miner
on beets and swiss chard. Timothy
just out of the boot and ready
to cut. Corn planting 80 per-
cent in, needs sun to green up well.
Rose chafer sighted widely, but
little sign of chewing yet.
The next few days are critical.
Thus heavily infested, June
lurches harvestward again.
Maxine Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1973 and has published twelve books of poetry, five novels, and four collections of essays, most recently Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2000) and Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (W. W. Norton, 2000). Her latest book of poetry, The Long Marriage, will be published by W. W. Norton in November 2001. Kumin and her husband live on a farm in New Hampshire. (updated 2001)