The Song of the Lark | Teen Ink

The Song of the Lark

January 12, 2024
By ruthholst SILVER, Hamden, Connecticut
ruthholst SILVER, Hamden, Connecticut
5 articles 0 photos 0 comments

The fields that once were luscious and green, now turned brown by the turn of the seasons—reflected in the sky lit by the setting sun and the earth-covered skin of a woman persisting in tilling the ground that has since rejected the plants it gave life to. Scythe still in hand on the worn dirt path, she sets her gaze not to the fields under her feet, but to the air above her head. 

She looks to the sky that holds mystery and desire and she knows it opens to her all the things the cruel ground could never offer; the warmth of the sun when it sits above the clouds that pour down rain and snow and ice to her fields, the clouds that decide when her meals will come. She does not know what it is like to soar; her feet are still planted in the dirt. 

The lark tells her what the sky is like. She sings of the breeze that tickles her feathers as it catches the underside of her wings and the wind that carries her more than she can carry herself. She flies from tree to tree, but she never reaches what is beyond the clouds. One day, she must build a nest. Today, she sings to the woman in the field who shares her dream.


The author's comments:

This is an ekphrasis piece inspired by The Song of the Lark by Jules Breton. 


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