Old asphalt beckons
Straight run to the mocking sun
Catch me if you can
Category: Landscape
Getting Over Canola
Prairie crossings
Keeping time
With the endless swag
Of powerlines
Skimming along
The road unreels
Mile after mile
O’er canola fields
Intersections
And railway lines
Break the monotone
With highway signs
This poem’s kinda wonky
Now that’s a fact
But canola‘s tough to work with
I wish it was flax
Grain Bins
Dotting the landscape
Checkers on a checkerboard
Harvest time: King Me!
Gravel Grid
I traverse the plain on a gravel grid
Left turns, right turns, always perpendicular
A jagged diagonal cutting from highway to highway
Beneath cerulean and cirrus
Six tires kick up dust so fine
It infiltrates the teardrop
I spent months
Making water tight
Small price
To drive through
This sparse, vibrant paradox
Heart of the prairie
A tabletop landscape dotted
With silos, barns and homesteads
Spread widely across the checkerboard
Of wheat, flax, canola and corn
To some, perhaps, a vast empty space
But from this tabletop to yours
Comes the bread
We spread the butter on
Spin ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #350
Spinning uncontrolled
Dizzy and stumbling about
Giddy as a child
Song to Silence
I wake in the mornings
Mind always in a foggy mist
To find, always
Like a whisper in the silence
Rising to become song
You are there
Nothing so rouses
My faded spirit
As your voice of grace
And compassion
Singing love to this soul
That’s lived in silence
Safe Harbour
Enveloped in the safe harbour of your arms
The pain
The fear
The anguish
Drawn away with the tide
I drift in the ocean of calm that is you
Until peace washes over me
Drifting not Adrift
When I lost her
Some small but integral
Part of my being
Broke away
For a while
It floated nearby
Just out of reach
Yet a lingering presence
The current of time
The drift of the everyday
That Island of her
Receded further and further
Until one day
I scanned the horizon
No Island was there
A single tear fell into the sea
The sea was unperturbed
It said to me
You have learned to live without her
That is all
I understood
I had forgiven her
And myself
For our breakup
I’d allowed the blame
To drift away
Which made me
Whole again
On Dust and Pickup Trucks
Backlit in amber
She swishes her tail of dust
Rumbling over the gravel
On a line smoothed
By springs and shocks
Uneven earth pummeling tires
While stones scatter and ricochet
Off her steel undercarriage
But for the pickups and semis
This is a placid place
Where the wind is but a whisper
In the tall grass
Heard below the chatter
Of red wings and starlings
I stand to the windward side
When the pickup approaches
Share a raised hand and a nod with the driver
As is custom in lands where people are sparse
And even strangers receive the grace of acknowledgement
Though he won’t slow his pace for the passing
Until he reaches the stop sign
Rolls through slowed and turns right
Signalless
I watch the truck accelerate
Southbound on the pavement
The roar receding
Until it becomes a memory
Soon enough replaced
With whispers and bird song
While the wind-blown dust
Settles serene and surreal
Across the landscape
Lingers in the hollows of the road
That becomes a different photograph
And I’m not sure which I prefer
Though, all the ones I tried before the pickup
Which were spectacular in the light as I took them
I know now will seem, perhaps, a little mundane
As the shutter clicks
I offer a mental wave and nod
To the long passed pickup driver
Thanks for the scenes you set
Then offer another to serendipity
The Great Retrieval
On a sun saturated plain
The things made by hands and their machines
Grow weary with time
Soon to be retrieved
By the Earth
And the things which need
No self-consciousness or master
To suffuse the landscape
With life and beauty