Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/green-grass-during-golden-hour--rSka4Bw-EU) 04.11.2023.
TEXAS EXIT
Out in the country,
way, way out,
where officialdom
is far distant,
and despised,
we make our own rules
when convenient,
and no one cares.
For instance
when I want to leave
the interstate,
when my road is near,
I just drive off –
across the shoulder,
across the grass,
to frontage road –
and home!
No one objects.
VERBENA
Rocky prairie hillsides,
open sunlit woodlands,
and roadsides drained,
all home to
Rose Verbena in
various pinks and
lightly lavenders
with blossoms crowning
heads of stems:
bright petal rings
heralding summer
with some continuing,
so cheerful, I
don't want to mow
them down!
Sadly they
quickly wilt
when pickt.
PRAIRIE SIGHTINGS
On the prairie highway
rolling up and down
miles and miles and miles of grass
sometimes nothing else
comes to view.
A tall, red block silo
with access doors collapsed,
mile long freight train
waiting on the tracks,
or grain elevator,
remnant of a town
long since faded
into nothing.
A lake is a delight
reflecting sky
and clouds sailing
serenely by
over old stone barn.
MEMOIRS OF CHILDHOOD
HOT
sun beating down
sweat dripping
shirt stuck to wet skin.
Work had to be done,
berries to pick,
muscles ache,
I staggered down the row
with boxes full, but
they were not enough.
“More to do!”
Overseer mother yelled.
I wanted to die.
No breeze,
no clouds
to relieve the sun.
Day would never end –
though not yet noon.
WAITING FOR RETURN
Rectangle of cement,
some foundation line,
homeless,
but love is evident:
bushes, flowers gone wild,
imported trees
and pump for water
under broken windmill,
plus a shed, leaning,
ready to collapse
as the family has
long, long ago.
Where are they now?
Married away?
Some, surely dead
in the cemetery near;
hope and money
exhausted.
About the Author: Duane L. Herrmann, internationally published, award-winning poet and historian, has work in print and on-line publications as Midwest Quarterly, Little Balkans Review, Flint Hills Review, Manifest West, Inscape, Gonzo Press, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, over one hundred other publications, over fifty anthologies, plus a sci fi novel. A fifth generation Kansan, with branches of his family here before the revolution, and a Native branch even longer, he writes from, these perspectives. His full-length collections of poetry include: Prairies of Possibilities, Ichnographical, Praise the King of Glory, No Known Address, Remnants of a Life, Family Plowing, and Zephyrs of the Heart. His poetry has received the Robert Hayden Poetry Fellowship, inclusion in American Poets of the 1990s, Map of Kansas Literature, Kansas Poets Trail, and others. This, despite an abusive childhood embellished by dyslexia, ADHD, cyclothymia, an anxiety disorder, a form of mutism, and now, PTSD. The father of four and grandfather of seven, he was surprised to find himself on a farm in Kansas in 1951 and is still trying to make sense of that, but has grown fond of grass waving under wind, trees, and the enchantment of moonlight.
