Poetry

The Big White Barn

Farmland, United States

Is dark and cool,

smells of sweet feed, hay

and horseshit.

It’s a good combination

– mostly.

From the door, turn right,

The code to the tack room lock

is written on the brown, bare-wood walls

right beside other ciphers and

a dangling workman’s pencil

hanging by a cotton thread,

the kind that come on feed sacks:

Camouflaged in the open, grandpa says.

Into the tack room;

smell the leather and feed:

There’s sweet corn to stuff in your mouth,

molasses and the big flattened corn – tasty.

The milled bits, not worth eating – don’t do it!

Turn left,

up the ladder is the sweet, grass-smelling hayloft;

dark and dusty,

with wooden chutes to the stalls below.

We are never to slide down them – and we don’t.

Unless we want into a side room....and there are no adults around.

We are cautioned about the giant door

two stories up, at the front of the loft

opening onto empty air – a long fall to the stony ground.

Don’t slide and fall out.

Also, you kids stay out, avoid:

the bull pen,

the farm machinery,

letting the cows out.

Remember! Close the gate that was closed,

or leave open gate that was open.

Many rules.

By adults.

Adults who come to shake the mulberry trees

with the tractor, making a rain of purple

onto worn, patterned sheets below.

We can eat the mulberries,

the cheap sandwich cookies,

the orange baby aspirin,

and the Alka-Seltzer - which fizz on our tongue,

but not the apples and pears on the trees.

Only the windfall fruits are ours.

Rust and Green

Prairie to Forest, United States

There I am, in Kansas,

where the wind presses

loudly against my ears.

The prairie stretches gray and gold,

a place too open to hold secrets.

Fighting the fate

of a front yard bristling

with farm machinery, rust-bitten and useless,

a dirt drive carved into hard-worn ruts,

and a dog chained to its doghouse,

pacing its circle, the ground worn bare beneath its path.

I hitch a ride east

with the first interesting man—

as miles roll past,

flat prairie blistering under skies

that stretch horizon to horizon.

The land finally rippling into soft hills

until the woods swell into view.

The Great Eastern Deciduous Forest—

a kingdom of oak, dogwood, and maple—

draws me in, drapes me in light.

The air cool, heavy, alive.

Here, the sky narrows to a green tunnel,

the smell of damp earth

wraps itself around me like an old memory.

Here, the wind softens to a whisper,

and the world folds in around me,

cool, damp, and layered with secrets:

a hollowed tree,

a fern-covered grotto,

a mossy well,

secrets waiting to be found.

I breathe for the first time

in what feels like years,

the air thick and loamy—

a homecoming I hadn’t known I’d missed.

In a place where the air hums with life,

where roots go deep,

where the land offers shade

and something more—

a reason to stay.

I am home.

So, There I Am – Crocodile Hummock

Outback, near Bolwarra, Queensland, Australia

So, there I am, perched on a hummock of grass

in the middle of a freshwater stream

in the pitch-black night

of the Australian outback,

with a few crocodiles:

Six, to be precise.

Two under each leg

and one under each arm, thinking;

I need to think about my life choices.

It’s all for science,

We were hunting crocs by eyeshine,

our head lamps freezing them in place.

We walk up, grab their mouths

sealing them closed with a simple rubber band.

Such powerful jaws to close,

so weak to open.

Things were going well, so well.

(So many eye-shines!)

We’d loaded our arms with crocs,

but the river brimmed with more -

too tempting, too easy.

My two companions, decided – and convinced me –

that I should stay behind, holding crocs, while they went off for more:

“Croc-sitting,” they called it.

They helped wedge the animals in, between leg and grass

then left me in the middle of the river, then vanished upstream.

So, there I am. Waiting.

And waiting.

I switch off my headlamp, to save power.

That is how we came to be sitting in the dark

under the southern cross,

the crocodiles and I.

Of course, to pass the time; I sang.

knowing no one could hear.

I serenade the crocs in my arms,

and those under my arms,

wooed, even, the crocs left behind

I tried not to think –

What if the men don’t find me, on the way back?

Are there any crocs big enough to eat me out here?

What if I looked tasty to some other Australian menace,

Or worse yet – what if I had to pee?

So, there I am,

singing on a hummock of grass,

in the middle of a freshwater stream,

with six crocodiles,

in the pitch-black,

beneath a star-struck sky,

considering my life choices.