Michael Hettich
"The Waist-High Grass"
Michael Hettich


The Waist-High Grass

One kind of innocence wanders for years
until it succeeds
in disappearing from itself—

another kind dreams it can breathe underwater
and learn how to swim
deep down into the darkness

at the bottom of everything, where the lost memories
wait, yearning to rise again

into the roots of trees, and up
into the leaves and sky, the sky

that is moving too quickly, always, to notice
the millions of bugs
alive in its belly,
the clouds and the birds, the fecund smells

of the Earth. I love you the sunlight sings
to those trees, as we walk in their shade like another
river that sparkles
with light. I love you

the heartbeat says to the lungs and the lungs

sing to the blood. I love you the wilderness
inside their bodies says to the people
we call ourselves, as the innocent shadows

of clouds full of dust and breath and rain
shape-shift across the waist-high grass
teeming with millions of insects whose lives,
my love, are as real as our own.

Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems, Waking Up Alone, won the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. His previous book, A Sharper Silence (2025), has been called a “heartfelt, heartbreaking collection” (Marie Harris), and his 2023 collection, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990–2022 won the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Book Award. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and he has published more than a dozen books of poetry across four decades. He serves as the coordinator of the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Distinguished Poet program and lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

ISSN 2472-338X
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