Greg Kuzma

Greg Kuzma (1944- ) is a Poet, editor, and essayist  and earned a BA and an MA at Syracuse University. His long free-verse poems often investigate the frame of personal memory. His numerous poetry collections include Song for Someone Going Away and Other Poems (1971), Good News (1994), and Selected Early Poems 1958–1983 (2010).

Melons

I have put my time into the ground.

I have stood with the hoe

and bent my back. I have dripped

in the sun like a leaf. Late nights,

with other work to do, I have 

stood with the hose, a swarm of bugs

around my head. It has done me good.

An aching back, a summer gone before

my eyes like smoke, old friends

neglected, new ones in the striving 

awkward plants. No writing done.

Who would have thought the growing

should take so long, that a handful

of seeds should come forth as a 

full blown field, with problems 

of its own. It broke my summer 

into dirt and sweat, weeds and worms.

I suffered both the morning and 

the evening vigils. I gave half

my crop to the birds. I worried

the drought with the peas, I

anguished in the heat that stood

above the ground and everything that 

had no feet to run away knocked down.

And even in the cooled off nights 

I burned.

— Greg Kuzma