This is a repost from 2008.
My brother and I just spent three days going through the last of the boxes of Mom and Family back home in Colorado. Among other treasures, we found a stack of clippings Mom had pinned on the bulletin board in the kitchen -- pithy quotes, comics, phone numbers...and this poem, printed from the blog eleven years ago.
* * * * *
This is a chant for the landscape of my growing up years -- the wide, flat, empty, semi-arid short grass prairie of eastern Colorado. The chant is comprised of images, authors, and, in italics, book titles.
The Solace of Open Places
or
It's Not the End of the Earth, But You Can See it From Here
High, Wide and Lonesome
unbroken sod,
O Pioneers! and
my Uncle Bob.
Great Plains: jackrabbits
antelope and Deere,
wagon ruts, meadowlarks
and tumbleweeds found here.
Kent Haruf, Hal Borland, Ian Frazier,
Gretel Ehrlich, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner.
Eventide, Plainsong
A Sense of Place,
Wolf Willow, My Antonia
Nothing To Do But Stay.
Lark buntings, windmills
towering thunderheads,
grasshoppers, feedlots
the family homestead.
Pioneer Women,
amber waves of grain.
Close my eyes, open a book,
I can go home again.
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2008
Margaret has the Poetry Friday Roundup this week at Reflections on the Teche.
