Poem of the Day: “On the Road after a Record Rain” by Ellaraine Lockie, Poet of the Week

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present “On the Road after a Record Rain” by Ellaraine Lockie, Poet of the Week.  A brief bio of Lockie may be found here: http://eretzsongs.blogspot.com/2015/11/poet-of-week-ellaraine-lockie.html.

On the Road after a Record Rain

Ellaraine Lockie

                           I

Morning coffee at the Bear Paw Bakery

requires the mettle of a Montana driver

The car acts like a drunk on the dirt road

Sloppy as a warm chocolate bar

I relax the steering wheel the way I learned at 14 

to let go and give in to invisible great forces

Press the accelerator in my vintage Lucchese boot

to ten m.p.h. with no braking 

To keep from sliding into the roadside parade 

of young pheasants behind their mother 

Down the road a cottontail wasn't so lucky

In polite farmer protocol its flattened body 

has been moved to the far side of the road 

A murder of crows waits on a power line

to clean up the evidence

Feathers gleaming like the coal

my father mined in the years crops failed

                           II

Back at the cabin the die-hard walker 

in me eases into Wellingtons

Not what I'd ever wear into the town 

of Tony Lamas, John Deeres and Durangos

Mud has mortared enough on the dirt road for footprints 

My earmark on the same land that was branded

by parents and grandparents

The swarm of dragonflies sired by heavy rains

disperses to flit from yarrow 

to wheat grass to wild geraniums

Sun lights them like day fireflies

and heats the still air with sweet grass 

vanilla scent and anise of coneflowers

The whole prairie sings a green song

By the time I backtrack to the cabin

tires have erased any right of ownership

The land has claimed itself once again

Poet’s Notes:  This is a love song about place.  One way to keep a special place alive is to write about it.  In the case of this poem, the place is a wheat farming community on the plains in Northern Montana that I consider my real home.  Although my permanent address is in Northern California, I still live as often as I can in Montana, albeit much of the time the living is emotional, mental, and spiritual.  The homestead that used to my family’s and the little town and the prairie surrounding them ground me like nothing else can.  

This poem is one out of many that I regularly read to myself as a kind of mantra.  It’s a comfort, almost a prayer.  I use this one in particular when I can’t get to sleep at night.  I take the walk in my mind and often change the season, encountering the corresponding landscapes, weather and animals, and often before I finish the walk I’m drowsy enough to fall asleep.  And if I can’t, I’m at least relaxed and happy. 

Editor’s Note:  I enjoy the way Lockie weaves poetic devices into the narrative, her simile regarding the dragonflies being a particular favorite.  The story holds my interest, and I further enjoy the way she plays with time here, seamlessly fusing elements of past, present, and future into the narrative.  The "boots" motif adds a nice human element and serves to unify the various parts of the piece. “On the Road After a Record Rain” was first published in Casa de Cinco Hermanas in 2014.