Wanderings on the Zumwalt Prairie (II)

 

If you clear a bit of the prairie

of rocks, that is, not grass

If you could, a dozen would do

You could build a sturdy old rock jack

Ostensibly to hold the barbed wire fence

but really an altar perch for meadowlarks,

for gospel music that you can embrace

Why are those two coyotes howling midday?

In harmony with the red-winged blackbirds,

meadowlarks and sparrows

While crickets talk thunder

with the black squall rising over the ridge

like a night with nattering stars

Some rain did fall

not enough to dampen the choir

just enough to chime in, awaiting

Yellow sun opened the grey veil

My toes picked a bouquet of wildflowers

even though picking was outlawed on the preserve

somehow my toes didn’t get the message

A spray of biscuitroot with yellow umbrellas

A splash of succulent wild onion

not enough to feed your belly

just enough to feed your sensory delight

somehow my spirit got the message

Francis Opila

cycle

egg-heavy geese -
the cycle of life,
then goslings, goslings

winner of 2011 Zumwalt Prarie Poetry contest - Dorian Zimmerman

Below Peaks like White Knuckles

Spring doesn’t come,

it molts,

gray with feathered clouds.

Gusts ruffle skies,

sloughing winter fluff.

White hills now downy

with yarrow—white puffs—

like the dappled flanks of fawns

ripple with invaders,

a Mongol horde

of cheatgrass.

Their tassels

like banners in a limp wind.

Terraced by tenacious hoof,

wounded ridges

beholden to their tenants.

Elk, deer, bighorns,

their white flags wisping

across the vastness—

dandruff from a dandelion’s fat head.

Slopes shorn

by river gossip and the mosaic

of Corriente cattle—

their name, almost “running”

in the native tongue,

yet

their indignant groans, their lowered

brows insinuate

an ensuing battle.

They, like their dueños,

will not flee.

Hard earth

beneath bootsoles—this

land disavows ease.

It has been this way,

eons.

Folks here,

like Steelhead smolts,

swimming backwards down-

river,

bent to their origins,

tailfins facing futures.

 

 

Dorian Zimmerman 

 

 

Thanks to Wallowa County Cultural Trust Coalition for the artist grant fund that provided the honorarium for this contest.

giving back

As you may know, Wallowa County Cultural Trust Coalition provided the grant that sponsored this contest and also production of the art box for poetry that the Nature Conservancy will be displaying.

After saving for 13 years, I got a new truck! I splurged and every time the license renews, the Oregon Cultural Trust, which supplied the grant distributed by the Coalition, gets $30. By the time I'm ready for the next truck, perhaps I will have put back enough for someone else to get a $250 grant for their art!

Below, the evidence!

Out on the edge

Out on the edge of the prairie

  where the brown bunchgrasses

     overlook green alfalfa fields

and the view is filled over 200 degrees

  with the span of the Wallowas

a low hill has a small ring of rocks.

What a location to sit and ponder

   of time and traditions and

     those-who-have-gone-before

yet... the crustose lichens lie thick

  on the up-turned faces of these stones

waiting still for one to come again.

A perfect perch on the edge

  of the wolf highway, where stars

     fill the sky and mind

to wait for a vision, to craft a tale,

   to consider what to pass on

to "the-people" who are yet to come.

What use did this site serve,

  what contemplation found field here,

     what stories lie buried, fed to the wind

as if... previous use might add value

  to what yet lies exposed and open

to the questing mind... and heart.

Ralph Anderson, Entry #25

carte postale

And if the prairie dreams

is it of mice in the
                     rye grass?
or is that the hawk's
dream of the prairie?

 

Susan Whitney

Susan Whitney, Entry # 24

1 of 1,000,000 (The Day Without Nouns)

Just for (the span of the sun and moon)
Name ( ) no thing
Along comes --blank-- the dark time

Make it (more than okay), let it
Be yours if there was a Name for that
Yet more, let it be beyond the gerund

Speak no (noun-meaning-word), just
pass along the (angled land) as if
There never was youth or (caution).

No need to Name the (feathered ones)
Sort the calls and cries (slot them)
in memory and (forget)

responding to William Stafford's Notice What This Poem is Not Doing. The
original title of the response via fortuitous typo, "The Day Without Nous."