Kansas

I’ve driven through Kansas more times than I can count, and I wrote this poem one December.

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Dead farms
dried out, leaning, flaking,
sheltered from the wind by clumped and clinging trees (which used to give fruit),
a wind which would blow these faded husks from the very face of the land.

Under the frigid gaze of a blinking hawk,
shriveling, retreating into the cold and sloping ground, they
go the way of the buffalo, an origin story in reverse.
What was raised up from the earth returning again, defeated.

The prairie, silent with a half-inch of snow, perhaps sad,
perhaps the embodied unthinking – sleeping, dreaming – god of entropy.
A half-mile to the east, a hillock rises, broken by a bluff, dropping down to a frozen stream.