Today's poem is by Carolyne Wright
This dream the world is having about itself...
William Stafford
won't let us go. The western sky gathers
its thunderclouds. It has no urgent needof us. That summer in our late teens we
walked all evening through townlet's say Cheyennewe were sisters at the prairie's edge: I
who dreamed between sage-green pages, and youa girl who feared you'd die in your twenties.
Both of us barefoot, wearing light summerdresses from the Thirties, our mother's good
old days, when she still believed she could liveanywhere, before her generation
won the War and moved on through the Forties.As we walked, a riderless tricycle
rolled out slowly from a carport, fatherswatered lawns along the subdivisions'
treeless streets. We walked past the last housesand out of the Fifties, the Oregon
Trail opened beneath our feet like the dreamof a furrow turned over by plough blades
and watered by Sacajawea's tears.What did the fathers think by then, dropping
their hoses without protest as we girlsdisappeared into the Sixties? We walked
all night, skirting the hurricane-force windsin our frontier dresses so that the weather
forecasts for the Seventies could come true,the Arapahoe's final treaties for
the inland ranges could fulfill themselvesahead of the building sprees. We walked on
but where was our mother by then? Your lungswere filling with summer storms, and my eyes
blurred before unrefracted glacial lakes.Limousines started out from country inns
at the center of town, they meant to driveour grandparents deep into their eighties.
Our mother in her remodeled kitchenwhispered our names into her cordless phone
but before the Nineties were over, bothof you were gone. Mother's breath was shadow
but her heart beat strong all the way in tothe cloud wall. You carried your final thoughts
almost to the millennium's edge, wherethe westward-leaning sky might have told us
our vocation: in open fields, we wouldwatch the trail deepen in brilliant shadow
and dream all the decades ahead of us.
Tweet
Copyright © 2018 Carolyne Wright All rights reserved
from This Dream the World
Lost Horse Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission
Home
Archives
Web Weekly Features
About Verse Daily
FAQs
Submit to Verse Daily
Copyright © 2002-2018 Verse Daily All Rights Reserved