After rain, the fields loosen.

They give back what they’ve been holding;

bottles, rusted nails, pieces of blue grass

the color of old medicine.

We walk slow, eyes trained to the ground,

as if the land might speak again

if we’re soft enough.

This is how history survives:

half-buried, waiting,

not preserved so much as tolerated.

Corn rows straighten themselves every year,

as if nothing ever happened beneath them.

But the soil remembers weight.

It remembers hands.

I have learned to trust what resurfaces.

What rises only after being weathered.

Ohio reminds you of this kind of patience,

how to wait for meaning

to break the surface on its own.