Words from the Huerfano Valley for My Grandchildren by Meredith Ann Fuller
Meredith’s poem resonates with my experiences as a prairie person where the wind, the sky, the cottonwoods and the prairie grasses smother the everyday din we humans make and allow “the long view” and empty places. Thank you, Meredith.
My heart is a migrant. Perforce I moved from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Plains. By happy startled choice, I live where the kindness of strangers is usually genuine, niceness is a nervous tic or a dessert you don’t have room for, but it would be rude to say no. I can no longer live without rolling prairie, a world that crests and disappears in vast sky. In the Mayan language, in la’ketch means I am another yourself. I aspire to that.
Words from the Huerfano Valley for My Grandchildren
Snow is falling in the Huerfano Valley.
Morning and evening I sit outside
first light, last light
head and heart filling
emptying.
What I wish for you is simple
moments, juncos dropping from a snowy sky
to seedheads of wheat, rye, prairie sunflowers,
and all of you there for it.
May you discover
for yourself and in your own time
that joy and pain move through like herds of elk and mule deer, here,
where I sit outside, watching them go by.
May you feel it
how all hearts, yours and mine
over and over
descend like ravens at dawn to feed from fields, drink from rivers,
ascend at dusk to mountain strongholds
some secret
some shared.
What I wish for you is vastness,
a long view, time itself made touchable in rocks and bent cedars
time enough to see shorn cottonwoods grow new arms
to see breath, your breath and the breath of others, made visible
in winter air
and to know it, to feel it in your heart —
like ice beneath a strengthening sun
time itself undone
by love.
Meredith Ann Fuller
Meredith’s poems have appeared in recent issues of The Iowa Review and The Perch (Yale School of Medicine and Wesleyan University). Camas: the Nature of the West, University of Montana. Quarry, an illustrated novel (joanandersonart.com), received a starred review and Best Indie Fiction award of 2017, Kirkus Reviews. Meredith holds an MFA from Queens University. Psychologist, mom, oma, distance walker, supporter of regenerative agriculture and sustainable food movements, she lives in Omaha, Nebraska.
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