Kansas

On my birthday I rode with some friends to Denver and back the next day. On the drive back, a poem started arising. Once I had the pen in my hand, though, I started to doubt if I'd be able to put the poem on paper. I was looking out the window and heard, "Let the land write it. Let the land write it." So the land wrote this poem, and for the first time EVER I haven't made a single change (let alone days, weeks, months and even years of fidgety little changes).

~ Kansas

Four friends in a silver car
driving between here and there . . .
right and left, the forever fields,
an ancient sea bed
cradling a sleeping prairie,
above, the blue blue blue
and picture book clouds
We are on this always road
with the wagon trains,
with the buffalo,
with the tribes
that were the land’s children
We are on this always path,
a landscape of suspension,
of integration.
A red tailed hawk
hangs motionless in a cross draft,
a tree-lined gully below
telling the story of water,
the memory of water,
the memory of silence
In our silver car,
a capsule of cool
under the sun’s fire,
we turn the music up,
sing as one,
share a bar of chocolate,
sucking our fingertips
to get it all,
to get it all.