January 12, 2010

Driving east from
the rocky mountains
the earth is smoothed
out like a sheet cake,

some uncrumpled portion
of a tectonic plate
still floating lazily
on a sea of fire,

and the wings of
Kansas are those of
the hawk, spread wide
and flat in both directions,

and the pioneering mothers
who wrung their aprons
centuries ago still wring
their aprons now,

wives of thin-lipped
farmers whose snow-
covered fields, they say,
feed the world.