150 Kansas Poems

22. To the Stars Through Difficulty: Iris Wilkinson

Individual Poet — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 04:17:27 +0000

Somewhere in Kansas,
a group of women sit round the table
telling stories of grandbabies, tornados, wigwams,
the importance of a good bra, the Taj Mahal, being
a yogini, joy, puppets and turning ships around full stern.
This does not seem at all odd.
It’s as natural as walking in the wind.
It’s as natural as waiting for the rain.
Sitting round the table telling stories, in Kansas,
is an everyday scene.

– Iris Wilkinson

21. To the Stars Through Difficulty: Al Ortolani

Individual Poet — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:27:20 +0000

A hiker sets his Minolta on the stone
fence. In February’s mist, cloud
within cloud, silence
is like a feather in the grass,
as much a part of the earth as of the sky.
He picks up his camera and unsnaps
the lens cap. Somewhere today
there is a photograph, a doe retreating,
an image connecting the distant hawk
to the fletching of his heart.
–Al Ortolani

20. To the Stars Through Difficulty: Patricia Traxler

Individual Poet — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 03:06:59 +0000

A doe comes from the deep woods and stands

alone there at the edge, her amber gaze sweeping

side to side, night’s glittering swath high above her,

unreadable glimmer of semaphore

that commands the human eye, inspiring

our dreams of distant furies and glories

realer than our own. But the doe never looks up

to learn what isn’t told; she already knows

the night like a mother whose darkness enfolds her

as if to protect her from all we’ve learned and made.

– Patricia Traxler

Note: strange thing happened as I wrote my 10 lines, and Caryn asked me to describe it: Knowing that this week I would have 3 writing deadlines, I decided to make an early start on my renga piece last week–but in keeping with the answering spirit of this form, first I went back again through all the renga entries from the start to that date, reading it all as one whole. By the time I’d finished reading, there was an image germinating in my head, of a doe coming out of the woods at night and never looking up at the stars above her the way we humans do, yet knowing things that we can’t know, even with all our star-gazing and study. I sat in bed with my iPad late that night and worked on the idea, fiddling with language and lines till I had a rough draft at 8:30 AM; then I fell asleep. When I woke later that day and checked my email I found there’d been a new entry posted–Daniele Cunningham’s. I opened it and literally felt a physical jolt when I read the opening line: “The deer know.” I was even more stunned when I got to the closing line: “What can they know when they don’t look up?” I considered scrapping my 10 lines, but then I thought that if somehow after a close reading of all the existing renga entries had preceded both mine and hers–and we had both arrived at very similar imagery in response–why not keep my lines and let them be a reply of sorts? What could be more in the spirit of renga, no matter how her imagery found its way into my head before I’d read it?

19. To the Stars Through Difficulty: Israel Wasserstein

Individual Poet — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:36:36 +0000

We are caught in it, pulled inexorably on—the arrow
points always ahead. Keep time with the clouds
of your breath, faint pulse through your veins.

The stars and their children do not watch,
are unaware. A breath: a great sea stretches beneath
the sweep of the galaxy. A breath: an arrowhead

pierces the sod. A breath: a planet sundered,
or thrown to the void. This is no mournful tale.
In such vastness, we fill our lungs with winter air.

An owl dives. We freeze. The sky keeps its own time.

– Israel Wasserstein

18. To the Stars Through Difficulty: Linda Rodriguez

Individual Poet — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:33:38 +0000

Owl, silent raptor, silhouetted against Flint Hills February moon,
bone moon, bitter month—when life force is infinitely fragile,
when cold turns blood to slow-moving slush, standing here
in these dark cedars—when even the hottest heart cools
with time’s creeping, the round of years, like the stars, our origins—
when we run into bare-branched, ice-trimmed night seeking love’s heat,
longing for flame inside, fleeing the one who’s fortified us in the cooling years—
when owl warns what we must do to dodge this silent ice-death. Breathe in
the prairie distance, the wide Kansas skies, the love beside us. Look up.
The blaze you seek spreads across the night sky.

– Linda Rodriguez

17. To the Stars Through Difficulty: Donna Wolff

Individual Poet — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:18:52 +0000

So far above us, a firmament of shifting darkness, infinite and

shimmering with distant diamonds, stars formed from

rapture and red fire in a giant nebula.

Here in this stand of cold cedars, we are lovers embracing,

sharing heat and kisses as is our human right. This February night

is written on our hearts.

It is the stars that gaze, they strain down to hear the symphonies

we sing. We bring sweet music to their ancient silence.

Kansas pearl moon, bare black branches, brown owl, breathe evergreen

For love is all, though unseen: And when we touch, we have all we need.

~ Donna Lash Wolff

16. To the Stars Through Difficulty: Wyatt Townley

Individual Poet — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:26:29 +0000

Breath: everything is riding on it.
Under the door winter slides
its white envelope, past due, past due

as we move from bed to chair
and room to room, our lives
sighing in the cedars

strung on backroads to this place
where we go in and out
breath by breath, gravel and ice

underfoot, Orion overhead.

–Wyatt Townley

15. To the Stars Through Difficulty: Ronda Miller

Individual Poet — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:14:14 +0000

Between you, me, the universe…I fear I shall go mad!
Still, stars spin their course….I spin mine.
I’m the stone eyed cold girl cursing her dog for dying.
No bullet sounds, artery to bone to brain to farmer’s wife, under the harvest moon.
The crash of cymbals as crescendos on my skin…..
Shooting stars surround until I vibrate from their tone.
No truths to behold; just a farmer mourning ashes turned to grain to burnt toast.
Seed carried, blood stained prairie dust settles, waits to create anew.
Stitch a wing from cardinal to owl to make the switch….disjointed yet alive..
An open wound…..breathe it back to life.

– Ronda Miller

14. To the Stars Through Difficulty: Roy J. Beckemeyer

Individual Poet — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:11:40 +0000

…the universal truth of a broken owl
suddenly shattered by a strand of barbed wire,
gone from magnificent pursuer to wheeling
wreck of hollow bones, his wing flailing, cloud
of down and feathers floating like incense,

his body an aspergil splattering blood onto
Indian Grass, anointing this flinty place
of sacrifice just as the last hint of starlight
implodes in his failing eyes, as he goes the way

of a lightning bolt or a gust of prairie wind…

– Roy J. Beckemeyer

13. To the Stars Through Difficulty: Joseph Harrington

Individual Poet — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:31:19 +0000

Like the bourgeois writer, contemplating
the hottest spell in fifty million years
while he burns his toast and eats it too

The fossils of the future worry him:
the sun will shine differently then

the stars will give off universal truths
at last without us without
lugubrious sounds of strangling aquifers

just a mob of gods
chasing a broken owl

– Joseph Harrington