Prairie Sure

September 05, 2012



I love the images in this poem by Carol Light, of Washington state.

Prairie Sure

Would I miss the way a breeze dimples
the butter-colored curtains on Sunday mornings,
or nights gnashed by cicadas and thunderstorms?
The leaning gossip, the half-alive ripple
of sunflowers, sagging eternities of corn 
and sorghum, September preaching yellow, yellow
in all directions, the windowsills swelling
with Mason jars, the blue sky bluest borne
through tinted glass above the milled grains?
The dust, the heat, distrusted, the screen door
slapping as the slat-backed porch swing sighs,
the hatch of houseflies, the furlongs of freight trains,
and how they sing this routine, so sure, so sure—
the rote grace of every tempered life?

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Carol Light, whose poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. Poem reprinted from The Literary Bohemian, Issue 12, June 2011, by permission of Carol Light and the publisher.

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2 comments

  1. Oregon Gifts of Comfort and JoySeptember 5, 2012 at 11:35 AM

    Hi Kathy,

    Carol's poem is beautiful. I really love the ones that you chose to put on here. They all speak to my soul.

    Kathy M.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kathy A. JohnsonSeptember 6, 2012 at 11:44 AM

    Thank you, Kathy. I'm so glad you like them, because I choose only the ones that mean mean something to me.

    ReplyDelete