Prairie

Wind sweeps across this picture

Meadowlark on barbed wire, yellow breasted door opens with its song

Weathered fenceposts hold the wire

Below the ground they slowly rot

Wind almost everyplace in this picture

Shirts on the clothes line, their sleeves ripple

The rattlesnake suns her long body on the scoria outcropping,

         her skin flutters above her like worn flags

Magpie flickers through choke cherry bushes at the edge of the creek

The black fruit sweetens in the long light

Beneath the wind

Do not forget the badger, who digs alone

         into the sod and the silence

While high above, wind carries the Rough-legged hawk on her long hunt

Over wheat fields that move in waves across the field,

         each stalk tossing its head like water 

And as far as eye can see,

         the shadow of anything standing ripens twice each day