At Home in a Word

You call this blanket of grass

Prairie, because you were born

a member of a tribe who took

to the lean feast in that name.

Your lips hold the word in

to give thanks just so: Prairie,

you say, and hear the grass

speaking through the thorny wind

season after season.  You sit

wrapped in that word.

-- from In a Place With No Map:
New and Selected Poems
Topeka: Woodley Press,   1997: 14
 

--------------------------

Ghost Dance

The blue shirt in which my father

died chafes my skin with the dried

sweat of his race.  The bullfrogs

punctuate the river’s whisper.

My steps step uncertain steps

in the dust as lightning forks the west,

a flash turning the darkness to dream:

The river runs deep, swimming with fish,

where coyote comes to the shore.

“Brother, it is good to see you.  Tonight

will be a feast, and every animal will

tell the story of the ancestors.  You will

find a place beneath the trees and know

the story of your kind so long denied.

And all of us will feel the embrace of life

in a world that fits its rightful place.”
 

Excursion

Climb through a missing window

in a country house and you enter

the ghost of another life.  Tempered

by years of weather, a flowered wallpaper

rots in ribbons to the whisper of wind

through the empty windows.  That

stove-less chimney, the creak at the top

of the stairs, the open trunk with its

rummaged junk, a torn tintype of

someone’s stiff-backed ancestor –

the upper room becalmed with emptiness

as your breath whispers, Yes, yes, I

know:  loss is forever.  I know now.

------------------------------

Stafford Ball Back Home 

           “Blunders cry out information.”

                     William Stafford, Daily Writing

We never report our scores.

No one in our league does.

Our uniforms are camouflage

jerseys and shorts.  We play

in the old cow lot and change

the rules once we know them.

The lazy give up and go pro,

if they’re grim enough. Sometimes,

we all get a trophy:  Least Valuable

Player.  I won again last week.

Excursion, Ghost Dance and Stafford...
are from a new collection to be published by
Washburn’s Center for Kansas Studies
in the spring, 2006.  The collection is titled
The Loose Change of Wonder

All poetry on this page
Copyright © by Steven Hind, 2006

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