Eclogue I:
Guide to Prairie Restoration

"And there are the dawns and the dusks when the snow is falling, when the lights in the villages take on a fat and gauzy glow, when the whole prairie world, although dark, seems somehow aglow, when the sky above the storm becomes the particular pale pink of a prairie rose in bloom." – Gruchow, from Journal of a Prairie Year






Winter! I cherish your bitter flavor
of cranberries, tangerine crescents on faience saucers,
the tea, sugar-frosted almonds (at best, two ounces). – Brodsky

                                                                I

By the bony silence of winter a dream of flower.
Rattle of traffic carries in it the headstrong whispers
from tech inside every screeching work truck.
Must push through the vision, lessen the frigid tension,
hold dear in the palm of our dream one image:
the sunshine rose is coming, Rosa Arkansana –

tend to it as we know we should like child.
A light rises up along the ice crusted lake.
The flat hammer walls of the city brighten just a touch.
I'll lean toward late June by conjuring the the achenes
as they unfurl, the fleshy floral tube will sing.
Hear the huddled seed throbbing in soil by spring?