For whom the grasses sway

There is great mystery in the writing of poetry.

 

It is a beginning without an end---

Or an end that desperately seeks its beginning, as a tail chasing its dog might do.

 

We travel through the not-yet-known to bring the two together.

 

It is a jumble of words and thoughts and half sentences that seem to make themselves known at all hours of the night or day, urging us to jot them down on paper or within some electronic application, lest we forget them.

 

We dump them into a pan and place it over a creative fire, waiting to be sautéed and seasoned just right; left to simmer a bit while an ingredient or two is added for flavor.

 

It is a journey of enjoyment and enlightenment as we work to join all the pieces of the puzzle. We don’t always know where it’s going, and that’s the fun.

 

With the heart and the mind as instruments, it is the job of the poet to evoke emotion by arranging these scramblings into a cohesive and hopefully coherent train that might provide an insight into the recesses of our very being.

 

It is the mind working to provide a voice to the soul; each soul being a unique creation of the universe.

 

At rest, the soul is a benevolent entity, yet it has a tendency to, at its will, scream out with a desire to be heard.

 

My heart, as it is known to do, wandered to the High Plains.

 

My body and mind necessarily followed.

 

In search of…?

 

---RAM

 

*

 

"For whom the grasses sway"

 

 

The walls of a soul touch the stars

And lay upon the land

To walk the lonely places

And welcome the echoes of silence

 

We are the sentient ones

The broken

And healed

And broken again

 

The tears to fall

And never know the earth

There to die as dust

And drift upon the lonely wind

 

Grain by grain

Cast to oblivion

To rest among the thistles

And float as cottonwood down

 

Confine us not to the firmament

But to the horizon

The wren’s feather

And the sweet summer’s cloud

 

Let us know this place

Beyond today

To fall quiet in the long solstice night

As a thousand snows

 

Let the wind be our breath upon your face

A sigh of contentment

Cast o’er the land

The smile of memories

 

It is our soul cleaved open

Invisible

Yet, we are everything

And nothing

 

Energy without mass

Intangible without evidence

Formless

Indomitable of spirit

 

Weep with joy

And pity not

For we are home

 

It is us

 

For whom the grasses sway

 

--

 

Rick Malo©2024

Photo---

There is little left in tiny Conway, Texas to show that a railroad once ran here.

But for more than 70 years the Rock Island 'Choctaw Route' passed through town, motorists along parallel US Highway 66 waving at the crew aboard R-67b Northerns as they highballed westbound freight over the horizon to Amarillo.

For the adventurous and the observant, there are still tiny trinkets and traces of this once-great carrier.

Just west of town an old line pole still stands along the roadbed, its form burned through by prairie wildfires, its crossarm laying in the yellow bluestem grasses of the Llano Estacado.

July 17th, 2024.

 

Done