Perhaps they’ll fly through the darkness, guided only by fireflies and heath aster,
on toward the capitol, where they’ll light on John Brown’s shoulders
as he marches straight out of Curry’s Prelude, cutting his path
with his Beecher Bible thrust out like a threat to our reactionary terrain.
He misses revolution — perhaps so do we — in these days we risk going back too far,
risk returning to our watery origins, the eastern edge
of a cretaceous ocean, rife with cattails, the ancient typha
reflected by moonlight on the placid surface of the interior seaway.
For now, the flint hills and farmland remain a landscape that can still bite
like a cottonmouth crawling up the banks of the Kaw.
— Matt Groneman
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 