Prairie sundown
Raises me up
The peace of a gentle end
Subdues the day’s winds
To scattered breezes
Playing in tall grass
Painted ambient amber
I breathe in
With a rush like the wind
Then out as a breeze
While the brazen sky
Sings the final notes
Of its golden lullaby
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
Dotting the landscape
Checkers on a checkerboard
Harvest time: King Me!
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
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
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
The pickup passes
Flicking a long tail of dust
Which prairie winds
Spread like golden icing
Across a latent landscape
Under sunset sky
Farmland is always a realm
Of hope and promise
And possibility
While also of heartbreak
And tragedy and ruin
As is any venture reliant
On the whims of nature
A single storm defines
The outcome of an entire season
For good or ill
Is saviour or saboteur
Or, as here, in Empress
No storm comes at all
And the glory of a golden-hour transformation
Only masks the calamity of dust
The land moves
Waves of soil and asphalt
Break at my feet
Transport me
To a distant beach
And the love I shared there
I imagine the wind
Carries wafts of brine and low-tide
Amid the many scents of you
Across this rolling sea
And a beckoning highway
I reach out for a hand
That cannot be here
Equal parts land and sky
A gravel grid takes me there
And then afar
The dust kicked up
Wind whisks away
An expanse left sparse
For what good seed may raise
The prairie, where sight lines end
Only at the infinite
Pix to Words 