The Sun Underfoot Among,Amy Clampitt was born in Iowa in 1920 and grew up, in her twilight years, to become one of the most respected American poets of her era. Brought up in a Quaker farming community, she originally went to Grinnell College before getting the qualifications to head for Columbia University. Although she always wanted to be a writer, it wasn’t until the publication of her collection The Kingfisher, when she was in her sixties, that she got the recognition that she deserved.
The Sun Underfoot Among The Sundews by Amy Clampitt
An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lines and shaped like a teacup.
A step
down and you’re into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-
to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted
understory, an overhead
spruce-tamarack horizon hinting
you’ll never get out of here.
But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they’re set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million
of them and again a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand believing,
that either
a First Cause said once, “Let there
be sundews,” and there were, or they’ve
made their way here unaided
other than by that backhand, round-
about refusal to assume responsibility
known as Natural Selection.
But the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in that cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.
Anonymous submission.
