A Roadside in Kansas

Tom Reiter Click to read more...

ReiterThomasAPThomas Reiter’s fifth and most recent book of poems, Catchment, was published by LSU in 2009. He has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review,  The Sewanee Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Kenyon Review. He is Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Monmouth University, where he held the Wayne D. McMurray Endowed Chair in the Humanities.

 

In every direction, the American Dream
with center-pivot irrigation. But not
on this land-boom Wichita & Western’s
remnant right of way. The rails
went for ordnance after Pearl Harbor,
the ties for firewood. Loam of glacial till,
minerals locked in by tall-grass roots
to make humus—5,000 years.
And then came the breaking plows.
But not here. In this narrow prairie, flowers
like tiny goblets, needle-and-thread
stitching designs on the wind, and compass
plants, their leaves aligned north-south.
Children loved to explore the prairie
beyond their fathers’ claims, compass plants
guiding them through bluestem grass
closing over their heads. They found headstones,
engravings to follow with their fingertips,
found outcroppings holding claws,
ferns, and the skeletons of fish.
They had charms to recite on the way back
so the ghosts of Indians wouldn’t turn
the compass leaves. Where are those children?
Can we hear their voices, those tones
with blossoms and soil and stone in them,
as they make their way home
on this lost original ground?

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