On Kerr’s Prairie Skyes
Elephantine skies
weigh down prairie flatlands
where sagebrush swats at
grainy memories,
kicked up with each step
like black flies
let loose from a peaty ditch.
A fine ochre of yellow and brown dust
blows hot over the stalks and straw of
an endless sea of wheat.
It salts my face and hair,
the grit gets under my shirt
and chaffs my chest.
If you follow the curved horizon
study sextant and compass
hold your course Magellan-sure
telescope your eyes
through the haze of heat waves,
you can make out a red grain elevator
adrift like the doomed Medusa on goldenrod seas,
it yaws in a nor’easter
tired floor boards groan and tiller
twists in the wind.
From a dipped wet tip
drawn up from a spring creek
hidden in the footprint
of a coulee
cobalt skies fill the canvas
wet with thunderheads
pregnant with promise,
alive with the germ of inspiration.
Earth and blue sky hold
an uneasy truce
in this border town
alone in a nameless plain.
I know this place.
I, too, drew awe
from the cold well
buried deep in the sepia-coloured
silt of nostalgia, drowning.
I, too, held my breath
to hear the hush
when the rushing wind
whispered my name.
~ Rob K. Omura
Rob K. Omura lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada where he practices law. He holds a BA in psychology and MA in history from the University of Calgary, and a LLB from Dalhousie University. He recently returned to his love of writing after a 15 year hiatus. He is active in education, law reform, the environment and the outdoors. His fiction and poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Arabesques Review, Barnstorm, The Rose and Thorn, Agency, 34th Parallel, Poems Niederngasse, edifice WRECKED and blue skies poetry. He is currently working on a novel.
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