Going Home (Oct. 2005)
by Ronda Miller

Grave sites scatter
either side of the dusty
gravel road like
a child's long forgotten marbles.
 
Many years ago
bitter, blinding tears
watered these sites daily,
caregiver to grass, trees,
headstones.

Present Memorial Days
produce less tears,
a hasty pulling of weeds.
A different life
acknowledges time
passing much too quickly,
not unlike the tumble weed
blown across the steady
incline of I-70.

The foot that pressed
lightly, nimbly
on the gas pedal
all the way west
as close to the Colorado
and Nebraska borders

as you can get,
now presses slowly,
age and pain taking their toll.

Silent tears fall
as the car heads in the other direction.
Going east now through
waving, russet colored wheat fields.

Leaving the high plains and heading for Lawrence,
remaining burial sites
too soon calling my name,
filling again with familiar faces
of people I love.

Guy

by Kevin Heaton

To Kansas for harvest from up in Moline.

Met a young girl, her dad owned the place.

Not long thereafter they wound up together.

Worked hard all their lives in the hardest of days.

Grandpa was wee, but lord, oh so mighty.

Profoundly moral but never in church.

Faith in the remedies not in the doctors.

Rolled all his own from a Prince Albert can.

You grab an instrument grandpa could play it.

Played the barn dances way back in the day.

"Civil War Ditties" on an old barn dance fiddle.

Work boots a tappin' a tune on the floor.

When I was just four they were still on the farm.

We'd go to visit, a big thrill for me.

I helped churn the butter and gather the eggs,

then up on the mare and away we would go.

The thumb he used most was eternally swollen

by a Chincapin burr many long years before.

Got a bum shoulder at a shelter belt picnic.

When he cleared his nose, best not be nearby.

That thumb on a horseshoe was Mozart to music.

Way up in the air that horseshoe did soar,

then down on the peg without ever slidin'.

He'd let me win quarters then win them all back.

There are those who might say grandpa was calloused,

but in the depression you got tough or died.

Mom always said they were poor without knowing,

always had love, food, and something to wear.

On a big-dialed Philco he listened to baseball.

When I hid his cap, he called me a scamp.

Had a stroke near the end while tuned to a ballgame.

Wouldn't go to the doctor,

we carried him there.