SEARCHING FOR STERLING

Somewhere in these woods
I imagine there are butter beans,
radishes and lettuce, eggplants and beets
growing and reseeding themselves year after year,
an anthology of vegetables
appearing after each winter
to remind us of the poet
who found words among the fields
and in the lives of those who worked them.

So many winters have passed,
and with them the farms,
the old schoolhouse, the church,
an entire community,
the people about whose lives he wrote,
subsumed and replaced by suburbia,
forgotten, except in his poems
and in the name of a road
that leads to where the butter beans grew,
and about which folks here ask:
“who was Sterling?”