What Keeps a Prairie Boy Humble
June 1 2008


Out west, they get their backs up
when you call it flat.
Because it’s the absence of trees that makes it prairie, not flatness.
You can feel it in your legs, walking
— the swell of the land, rising and falling
like a vast land-locked ocean;
and the steady wind
waving through grass.
And the sloughs and bluffs and moraines,
the footprints of ancient glaciers.

And it’s a sky as high as heaven
with its clear blue light
that reminds you of your place,
a tiny speck
on a treeless plain.
So you can stand in sunshine
looking hundreds of miles away
at clouds as black as anvils,
and dark curtains of rain,
and bolts of lethal lightning
strobing down
— all utterly soundless.

Which is what keeps a prairie boy humble:
the indifferent sky
that overlooks this patch of earth.
And how a minute of hail
can smash a season’s work.